Government Operations committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair, for the member's question. I'm sure the member is aware we run literally hundreds of data centres, so it would depend on the nature of the workload. Not everything we do is secret, protected B. There are some things for which there isn't that sensitivity, absolutely, and it would be disclosable.

Government Operations committee  Mr. Chair, I'm not going to comment further.

Government Operations committee  I'm sorry, Mr. Chair. I'm not sure.... I heard a statement, not a question.

Government Operations committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. I appreciate the clarity from the member. I can assure you I am in no way attempting to mislead the committee in any of my answers. Absolutely not.

Government Operations committee  The security assessment, which is constantly changing and which is relevant to the previous member's question, is material here. As we move more services to digital and online, the number of threats are increasing, as I testified earlier. This is not my data. This is from Scott Jones from the CSE.

Government Operations committee  We set up the supply arrangements. Departments come to us with their requirements, and we go to market to fill them. We do that, either through competitive processes.... If you look at the materiel, that's about 87% of the time, a little over $1.13 billion. Sometimes we do that through a non-competitive process, because of the urgent nature of the requirement.

Government Operations committee  Frankly, it's pretty much final. If we go out through a competitive process, the requirements are the requirements. The submissions from industry are assessed against those requirements as per procurement policy. When a winner is selected, it has a right to supply. The departments do not get to veto that.

Government Operations committee  That's an exceptionally broad question. I don't want to frustrate the minister with my answer. If there's more precision—

Government Operations committee  Thank you. That's much clearer. Departments will come to us with their requirements. There are times when they will say, “We can't accept interoperability. We don't have the time to test anything.” They want like-for-like. They make the case that we have to get, not necessarily Cisco, but it could be any vendor's gear.

Government Operations committee  Mr. Chair, our data centres do not.

Government Operations committee  I want to double-check my list, Mr. Chair, but that, to me—the location of the data centres—based on the member's question, would be national security. Those are assets, the workloads in them, what moves through them, including, unfortunately—I know it sounds strange—an empty data centre.

Government Operations committee  Thank you for your question. Absolutely, I have a responsibility to keep the minister informed and aware of the activities of Shared Services Canada, but that also includes a certain separation, for example, on things like procurement decisions and others where it is the department's responsibility and not the minister's.

Government Operations committee  This will hopefully answer other members' questions about why certain pieces of information have been withheld. On any given day, when I arrived at Shared Services two years ago, there were over 400 unplanned outages per day. This past year, we had almost 80-some thousand unplanned outages.

Government Operations committee  It's not a “view”, Mr. Chair. It is a requirement.

Government Operations committee  I'm sorry, Mr. Chair. How many...?