Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the member for Abitibi—Témiscamingue for his question. I also want to thank him for attending the technical briefing recently held for members of Parliament.
This debate gives us yet another opportunity to share with Canadians our commitment to ensuring that they may continue to receive the critical federal benefits to which they are entitled. We have been investing in benefits delivery modernization because Canadians deserve functional and responsive services that are dependable and modern. Any interruption to old age security, employment insurance or the Canada pension plan could significantly affect recipients' abilities to meet their daily needs, such as buying food, paying rent and just getting by. To guard against this problem, ESDC has spent more than $1 billion in maintenance over the last 10 years. The older and more obsolete these systems get, the more costly it becomes to run them and the more fragile they become. It is simply not sustainable.
This undertaking currently is massive and requires significant investments. Between 2017 and 2025, the BDM project has cost $1.8 billion. The program will bring together old age security, employment insurance and Canada pension plan payments onto the BDM platform, in a phased and prudent manner, by 2030. It will also bolster cybersecurity and bring together a number of call centres onto a single, modernized, accessible platform by October 2027.
As with any technology project of this scale, many of the costs that needed to be considered could not be fully known at the start. Over time, the estimates have become more refined as we better understood the complexity of unravelling decades-old systems, the challenge of protecting against modern security threats and the impact of unanticipated global inflation across markets and supply chains. Despite this, over the life of the program, total benefits to Canadians will amount to more than $1.6 trillion, while funding expended on the BDM platform is less than 1% of the total payout of these programs.
To operate the core technology, ESDC selected the Cúram social program management platform. Cúram has been chosen because it is a platform designed specifically for managing large and complex social programs. It is a proven product that comes equipped with built-in functions that other generic platforms would have to custom build and test, which would have increased the time, cost and risk to deliver. As of 2023, Cúram has been successfully implemented by 970 government social programs across 12 countries, serving 187 million clients worldwide. Before choosing Cúram, the BDM program studied its deployments in other jurisdictions and examined the past experiences of these deployments to design a solution tailored to the federal context, not to replicate an existing model. Our number one priority is maintaining the delivery of benefits with no interruptions, so we are making this transformation carefully and in phases. Everything is fully tested before release.
To date, the new Cúram system has made close to 90 million payments to more than 7.7 million clients, distributing nearly $85 billion in benefits accurately and on time.
Managing EI benefits is the next step. The first stage occurred in November 2025, and all EI benefits will be transitioned to the new platform by 2028. The BDM project is a major project and necessary, and it is helping us reimagine the way services get delivered to Canadians.