Government Operations committee  I am not all that up to speed on Huawei relative to the other vendors that we deal with on a more frequent basis. You have my apologies.

Government Operations committee  Thank you. I'm definitely more comfortable answering the question when it's posed that way. I think it is generally accepted that, years ago, Cisco had a large share of the marketplace, and I think that is representative of what we inherited. I would again point members back to the documents that I shared with you, where we tried to be very transparent about when SSC was created and what we inherited.

Government Operations committee  Mr. Chair, I will ask Marc to elaborate if I can't help. If only it was just DOS. There are some applications that are as old as I am.

Government Operations committee  Thank you for your question. It's a very interesting question, in my opinion. I believe that in the past, we were focusing solely on scheduling cost risks. Everything was about “give me the perfect plan, contain the costs”. We weren't behaving in an agile way, and we weren't focusing on the outcome risks.

Government Operations committee  Mr. Chair, I thank the member for her question. Unfortunately, my answer is not simple. It's because of the complexity. In some areas, like on Microsoft Teams, where the OCIO had personas and we were able to move very quickly to deploy the technology, it was easy. In other areas where we have systems—not the hardware but the systems—that need to be modernized to be able to operate in the cloud in a cloud-native way, those will take longer.

Government Operations committee  Mr. Chair, I thank the member for her question. This is a continuous improvement approach, because of security and technological progress. For example, 5G is coming, so we will never be finished with the network. We are constantly introducing security upgrades and patches. We need to introduce two-factor authentication.

Government Operations committee  Thank you for the question. First, we're going to be transparent and document it. That's why we have the “Network Modernization Way Forward” document. In addition to that, we have a lower-level, more technical reference document moving forward. We have regular industry days where we open these up.

Government Operations committee  There's none. We do not deal with Cisco. We deal with resellers.

Government Operations committee  A number of vendors are resellers. We would be happy to provide that list. For clarity, we do not deal directly with Cisco. We deal with resellers.

Government Operations committee  Absolutely. Shared Services is responsible for all IT-related procurement—email, telephone, compute data centres—for the entire Government of Canada. We do all of that on behalf of all ministries. Some things, like our cloud services, are available to other levels of government, and when they ask, we are happy to provide advice to them.

Government Operations committee  You have my apologies, Mr. Chair, if I didn't address that part of the question. Without a doubt, we do not have a particular bias for any one vendor. We have a bias for the requirements and the outcome. Our responsibility is to keep the systems up and running. I fully acknowledge, which was part of the material I shared with committee members earlier, that we inherited an awful lot of Cisco equipment from the departments—absolutely—so when it comes to break/fix, there is an awful lot of like-for-like Cisco replacement.

Government Operations committee  Yes, we will do that.

Government Operations committee  The first is through the digital standards that the office of the chief information officer, Marc's office, has established. There is a call to adopt open standards. That will be driving our work moving forward, so anybody who is able to comply with those open standards.... It's definitely a move that we are making, to comply with that standard.

Government Operations committee  Thank you for your question. I want to be as clear as possible. I know it's implied in the question, but my mandate is for government only, so there are other things going on in broader society I'm not able to comment on. With respect to all procurement for the Government of Canada, our policy is to apply full supply chain integrity end to end, and only companies that are able to pass that supply chain integrity will be allowed into the government ecosystem.

Government Operations committee  Thank you for your question. It is not appropriate for me to talk about matters that involve other levels of government. I feel it would be inappropriate for me to speculate on the motives of other levels of government. I'm happy to testify with respect to my mandate.