Government Operations committee  It really goes to there being a culture of official statistics that says that if the independence of the organization is fundamentally compromised, you have to take whatever course of action you think will produce results. Having taken every step short of resignation, I thought

Government Operations committee  Absolutely.

Government Operations committee  I think that if the Auditor General is participating now, it is no doubt on a voluntary basis, which means he still has control over what happens and whether that relationship continues, and he can withdraw. If that situation existed in Statistics Canada.... I presume the Auditor

Government Operations committee  We are, but an application can't be separated from the hardware it runs on. I can write a beautiful application, which I have done in the case of this new website. If I can't get the hardware to run it on, it's useless. It's a wasted investment. It's money down the drain.

Government Operations committee  Clearly there were. There were significant hacks of some government departments, but one of the things that kept Statistics Canada safe, that Shared Services Canada and other government-wide initiatives have forced us out of, was that we isolated our major networks. The networks

Government Operations committee  I don't know the exact number. I had three or four meetings with Mr. Parker in various contexts. My chief information officer met with him on a regular basis over the course of the summer, trying to resolve these immediate operational issues and not making a lot of progress. In t

Government Operations committee  Yes, I was there for 35 years.

Government Operations committee  We had introduced some types of service-level agreements but they were less critical. Statistics Canada works in project teams. It doesn't work in its hierarchy. When we're building something and we're running a large program, each area is represented on the project team. Each ar

Government Operations committee  My view—and it's still my view because it hasn't been demonstrated to be wrong—is that the Statistics Act says that the confidential information holdings of Statistics Canada, the information provided by Canadians and their organizations for statistical purposes, can be in the ha

Government Operations committee  Obviously, as I mentioned, I met repeatedly with Shared Services Canada and raised the issues with them. I met with the various secretaries of the Treasury Board and raised the issues there. I've raised the issues with the portfolio office of Industry Canada, which is the portfol

Government Operations committee  There was nothing. Quite literally, I've never received a meaningful suggestion about how these issues could be addressed, either within or outside of the existing framework. The discussion tends to go along the lines of, well, the Shared Services Canada initiative is important t

Government Operations committee  That was my understanding.

Government Operations committee  For example, the money that was transferred was more than sufficient for Shared Services Canada to maintain the capacity of the legacy data centres in line with the requirements of Statistics Canada—

Government Operations committee  —as they had been for years. They decided unilaterally that they would not do that. They also decided that they would not maintain the data centres, and that they would cancel the service contracts on the various servers on which our programs rely, creating enormous risk to Stat

Government Operations committee  At the time I left, the project to revise our website services was, effectively, in disarray. We had not received delivery of the hardware infrastructure that we required. Another program that was building a new integrated collection operation system to increase the efficiency of