Public Accounts committee  But again fundamentally, I think it's the fact that there is so much churn, and so much rapid churn, at the deputy minister level.

Public Accounts committee  Thank you. Mr. Chair, thank you for this opportunity to discuss the message that I included as part of our spring 2018 reports. I am familiar with the testimony of the Clerk of the Privy Council when he appeared before this committee last week. I first want to say that I agree

Public Accounts committee  It's the same message I often repeat: the importance of focusing on objectives and results. Of course, I understand and agree that federal public servants take their work seriously. They work very hard for Canadians. However, it is also important that the government create a cu

Public Accounts committee  Are you referring to the Gartner report?

Public Accounts committee  My understanding is that the Gartner report was commissioned, yes, in December, I believe, of 2015, and it was completed in February of 2016 just before Phoenix went live.

Public Accounts committee  I wouldn't be able to give you a complete list. I'd have to go back, but the report was prepared by Treasury Board. My understanding is that Treasury Board gave it to the project executives responsible for the Phoenix project. Who saw it within Treasury Board or exactly everybody

Public Accounts committee  Again, once things get behind the doors of what goes to ministers, there's the world of cabinet confidence that we can't get into, so I don't know how that would have been distributed in terms of the minister or the minister's political staff. I wouldn't know that.

Public Accounts committee  We couldn't find any documentation of the approval to go live with Phoenix.

Public Accounts committee  That is one of the fundamental things you expect to find when a new IT system is put in place. You expect to see the sign-off by the system owner saying that the system is ready to go into production. We couldn't find that type of documentation in the case of Phoenix.

Public Accounts committee  Well, I don't know about the minister per se, but certainly you would expect to find—as I said, it's just normal practice in putting an IT system in place—a signature from the system owner. I think perhaps they had some difficulty in defining the system owner, but in this case, y

Public Accounts committee  Thank you. As I say, what I was trying to do was to start the conversation, and I think I did that. I appreciate that the committee is picking up on that. I was also quite frankly happy with what the deputy minister of Public Services and Procurement Canada said when it came to

Public Accounts committee  Again, if you go back to that particular example of the budget compared to what IBM said it would cost to build the system, at that point in time, as I have said a number of times before, it was not just a question of needing to respect the budget; it was also saying that if they

Public Accounts committee  Of course, that was one of the causes. The managers responsible for Phoenix were aware that there were problems and that the project posed great risks. However, we must also take into account why they decided not to mention those risks. Did the culture play a role in the decisio

Public Accounts committee  I certainly would not say that that happens every time. Obviously, though, in the case of Phoenix, in this situation, there was a decision not to bring that information forward, and as we said in the audit, there were very clear signals that Phoenix was not ready to launch, wheth

Public Accounts committee  I'd have to go back to the auditors to figure out exactly who we asked which questions. We certainly were trying to find out what information went forward, and again, we were only able to find that the information that went forward to the deputy minister was very high level, didn