Government Operations committee  With regard to the previous government, I'm not absolutely certain in terms of what the process would have been. For example, if I would have been responsible for the financial resources for the development of a website under the previous government, we would have done it very si

Government Operations committee  No.

Government Operations committee  I've been a chief financial officer in PCO since June of last year, but I was a chief financial officer for Natural Resources Canada prior to that, for three years.

Government Operations committee  I've had some experience with regard to the estimates process. What I can say in terms of the process is that the process is very similar. You start out with a budget, and the budget announces what a department is going to do. How you actually access those resources is done throu

Government Operations committee  Some of these functions are actually new functions. If we go to digital by default, we would not have been doing that kind of function prior to 2016. We would have gotten additional resources to do it. In order to spend those resources, it would have been a combination of a coupl

Government Operations committee  On the public accounts, what you'll see is how we've spent our money in different categories. You will also see, in our departmental results plan, how we've used our money very broadly in those various categories. You won't see something specific that says “$400,000 on a website”

Government Operations committee  Yes.

Government Operations committee  Absolutely. Whenever there is downtime for any position, people are reassigned or provide support to other areas that might be seeing an increase in workload. It's not like they just wait until they have the Senate appointment and are working on it. There are a lot of other activ

Government Operations committee  The budget of the Prime Minister is similar to what has.... I'm sorry. I'm just going to find my page. It has been the same amount for the past number of years. It's $10.5 million per year. It's expected to be the same.

Government Operations committee  That's $3.3 million.

Government Operations committee  I think that for the next few years we have that. We have about $400,000 ongoing, but we will have roughly $4 million per year in terms of upgrading our workspaces.

Government Operations committee  IT is one of those things that can be somewhat misleading. When we talk about a website, the people who apply to the website put in their personal information. We have to make sure that information is secure. What we would have done in order to stand up the website last year was

Government Operations committee  But we will use the existing platform. What we need to do is work with our partners to do this. We don't say that it's $400,000. We go out and get cost estimates to do it. What we're going to be doing this upcoming year on that website is just making sure that it is robust, becau

Government Operations committee  Last year, we would have received $1.4 million, and part of that $1.4 million would have been the initial pilot project for the Senate website. What we need to do is put it on a more robust platform, so we will be using resources out of the $1 million that we're receiving in our

Government Operations committee  The million dollars isn't just for the website. It's supporting the advisory committees. Those advisory committees are set up in the provinces where there are vacancies. That will be something that's ongoing. We do have resources that are into the future, but once the website is