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I call the meeting to order.
Welcome, everyone. We're going to get going.
This is meeting number 45 of House of Commons Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates, also known as the mighty OGGO.
We have a shortened meeting today. We are going to do two 45-minute sessions. The first is with our witnesses, Mr. Ossowski and Mr. Manji, and Mr. Manji is appearing virtually.
Mr. Clerk, can I just confirm that Mr. Manji and everyone appearing virtually have passed the sound test?
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I am John Ossowski. Up until June 24 of this year, I was the president of the Canada Border Services Agency.
As I am appearing before you today as a private citizen, I will remind members of the committee that I no longer have access to any departmental documents on contracts or financials for the ArriveCAN application. I note that you have already met with departmental officials, who have provided this information.
I think it's important for the committee to recall the operating environment of April 2020, when we received a call from colleagues at the Public Health Agency to develop an application for them that collected traveller and health information. By the end of April 2020, 100,000 people around the world had already died of COVID-19, and infections in Canada were at around 30,000 cases. This was a time of great uncertainty, and the need was urgent.
Despite restrictions on entry at that time, in April 2020 the number of travellers who were exempt and arriving by air was around 70,000, compared to the close to 3.2 million who arrived in April the year before. Up until this point in time, travellers had to provide verbal responses to the CBSA officers making sure they were compliant with the myriad rules being established through various orders in council. The result, when combined with the need for social distancing, made airports chaotic scenes. Paper was being distributed to travellers to capture contact tracing and quarantine plan information. These were critical data points for health officials, both federally and provincially, who were desperate to know who was coming in and where they were going.
In the early days, the CBSA collected huge volumes of paper, and the government was challenged to convert this information into usable, shareable electronic data—a process that took well over seven days. It was critical for federal and provincial health officials to have timely access to this data in order to slow the spread of the virus. In addition, I recall the average passage time per traveller was up to seven minutes long. You might also recall that in those first few months of the pandemic, there were concerns the virus could live on paper for extended periods of time.
Needless to say, it was clear to everyone that we urgently needed a scalable digital solution that would help the travelling public as well as health care authorities.
Fortunately, the CBSA had some initial IT experience with mobile apps in the border context, as we had been looking for some time, along with our Border Five colleagues, at similar approaches to help speed up the border processing of travellers. However, the agency needed outside support for the app's quick evolution. As health measures continually adjusted, so did the application, with over 70 iterations being developed and released for Apple, Android and web-based platforms. Many of these were fundamental changes that required significant recoding.
As the Public Health Agency was the business owner of ArriveCAN, we took direction from them for requirements. The CBSA passed along all data collected for them to share with the provinces, which were desperate for this information. Over time, the CBSA built in new aspects that helped validate the proof of vaccine certificates of foreign nationals using AI tools, as well as the ability to validate, in real time, critical provincial QR codes to make it easier for Canadian citizens. We had a high degree of confidence in their certificates.
Because the app was linked with passports, provincial vaccination credentials and CBSA systems in real time, many travellers were never asked any questions about ArriveCAN or their health care status. Instead, for the roughly 30 million submissions for, I'm told, 60 million travellers, the border service officer simply saw a green check mark on the screen advising them that all border health requirements had been met, because the app provided and validated the information in advance. This allowed the officer to focus on the over 100 pieces of legislation and regulations they administer on behalf of other departments.
Eventually, the same approach was applied on the commercial side. We built in a feature for frequent crossers that saved their profiles so that they didn't have to refill the entire set of questions for each passage. Each iteration of the app required careful consideration of hundreds of scenarios, regression testing, accessibility, security, approvals by the app stores and linkages with many departmental systems.
As I mentioned earlier, along with our Border Five colleagues, we were looking at technologies like ArriveCAN to better manage risk and improve throughput at airports, something the air industry had been requesting for quite some time. Indeed, even though the app is voluntary, it is still being used every day to complete advance declarations to further speed up passenger processing times at the airport.
Budget 2021 provided the CBSA funding for traveller modernization. I would encourage members of the committee to look at a short video about it on the CBSA website. I have given the clerk of the committee the link to this video.
In closing, I would like to say that I am incredibly proud of how the agency responded to the call for help from our Public Health Agency colleagues, provinces and territories, as well as the air industry. I am excited that technologies like this will be used to continue to improve the traveller experience while keeping our borders safe and secure.
Mr. Chair, I am happy to answer any questions from the committee.
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Good afternoon, and thank you for having me here today.
My name is Zain Manji. I'm one of the co-founders of Lazer Technologies.
Lazer is an engineering and design studio that helps fast-growing start-ups as well as large and established organizations to build and ship amazing digital products and experiences. Some of the companies we have helped include Shopify, RBC, The Weather Network, Canadian Tire, LoyaltyOne and many more. The projects we have worked on span a number of industries including health care, e-commerce, finance, crypto, media, gaming and more.
When we work with companies, we focus primarily on the design and engineering execution of their products. This includes items such as product discovery; UI/UX discovery, or user interface/user experience discovery; wireframing; high-fidelity designs; architecture designs; product road map planning; engineering execution, such as back-end infrastructure; front-end engineering; DevOps and more. We also do go-to-market strategies.
In addition to helping these great companies, we also build our own products in-house. One of the products we built was a COVID-19 vaccine-finder chatbot, which someone could use to text a phone number with a postal code and that phone number would text them back with the closest three to five vaccine locations for that postal code. Through this product, we helped over 150,000 Canadians find vaccine locations across Canada.
Personally, I have been in technology for over 10 years as a software engineer and a product manager. Prior to Lazer, I worked at Google, Yelp and Instagram. I completed my Bachelor of Arts and Science degree at the University of Toronto in computer science and economics.
I believe I was invited here today because after reading about the dollar figure associated with the ArriveCAN app development through a Globe and Mail report, we made a cloned version of the ArriveCAN app's front end in two days. We did this because we wanted to shed light on how quickly the front end of an app like this could be made and how capital-efficient it could be if the right parties were engaged in the process.
We believed that by building the front-end experience of the app, we could open up the discussion as to how to improve the way Canada produces new technology. Personally, being deeply embedded in Canada's tech community, we also wanted to show that Canada has exceptional talent that is eager and excited to help out our country if need be.
We have already seen examples of this two years ago, first when Shopify engineers created a COVID-tracing app for free, and then a year ago when we created a COVID vaccine-finder app for free.
Personally, I love that the government is placing more of a focus on becoming digital-first. I hope we can continue to improve the transparency and efficiency around the development of Canadian digital projects. I also hope that we can work together towards creating the better structures, teams, resources, tools and frameworks that are needed to build the best technology for Canadians.
At the end of the day, we would love for Canada to become the most proficient when it comes to new technology and be a prime example of a country that develops impactful technology well.
Thank you.
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Thank you so much, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, Mr. Ossowski and Mr. Manji, for being here with us today.
Mr. Manji, I'm going to start with you.
I think the hackathon, or the work that you did—I also come from a tech background—has very much been misinterpreted and misused.
Let me start by asking you this: Did you ever claim that all of the costs for ArriveCAN—not just the development costs, but all of the costs—could have been $250,000?
Did you ever say that?
Thank you very much, Mr. Manji.
Mr. Ossowski, can I turn to you, please?
Thank you so much for coming. You know, you're not in the public service anymore, and it's very nice of you to come to committee without the resources you would have had if you were still there to go through documents to assist you.
Can you just make something very clear? I think you answered Mr. Barrett on this. No politician ever directed you to contract with any particular company on ArriveCAN. Is that correct?
At the beginning of the pandemic, our country didn't have enough supply of personal protective equipment, and we struggled to procure supplies during a time of high global demand. The government encouraged Canadian industries to help meet the need for these products, and many small and medium-sized enterprises began producing PPE.
These businesses invested in setting up shop, creating innovative products like more breathable and sustainable masks and respirators, and employing Canadians. Sadly, many of these businesses have since shut down or are at risk of closing because the government awarded contracts to multinationals instead of supporting this emerging domestic industry.
I'll give you an example. Dave Brimacombe, who owns Wayward Distillery in Courtenay in my riding, is a retired veteran who works very hard. He donated $75,000 of PPE hand sanitizer to local health workers and to first responders. He donated that. Later a subcontractor through Loblaws contracted him to provide it. Then Canada started bringing in a foreign supply of hand sanitizer, and it flooded the market and drove the cost down. Then the Loblaws supplier suddenly cancelled the contract after they had asked him to scale up. He ended up eating the $400,000 on his own after he came to the rescue of Canadians.
I think it's in our national interest to ensure that we have a resilient PPE industry here. We know that new variants of COVID-19 still remain a threat and we must be prepared for future pandemics. If Canada does not prepare its own PPE industry, there's a risk that it will disappear. We need to ensure that we're prepared for national security.
I believe it would be a good use of this committee's time to hear from domestic PPE manufacturers about the state of the industry and the barriers they faced in the federal procurement process. I believe this committee could do some valuable and timely work making recommendations on how procurement practices can better support this important domestic industry.
I'm going to read the motion. The motion is:
That pursuant to Standing Order 108(2), the committee undertake a study on the role of federal procurement in fostering a resilient domestic personal protective equipment industry; that the committee have no less than three meetings to hear from witnesses; that the committee request testimony from the Minister of Public Services and Procurement, any relevant government officials, and industry representatives; that the committee report its recommendations to the House and that, pursuant to Standing Order 109, it request that the government table a detailed response to the report.
Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Ossowski, for your work and your team's work.
I'm going to ask a bunch of rapid questions. I'm trying to get to a couple of points.
I understand that the development cost of the application was roughly around $8.8 million. The first version was within a couple of months, and it came to about $80,000. There were 80 orders in council, or OICs, and 70 rounds of updates to that application within 18 months. Are those numbers facts, sir?
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Let's talk about the speed with which this application was developed. We'll get to the complexities in a minute.
If I take 18 months, and I either use 21 working days or 30 working days divided by the 70 versions that were developed, if I'm using 30 days, it will end up about seven days per version that was developed, and if I use 21 days, it will be five and a half business days to develop.
In your testimony, in your response to one of my colleagues, you talked about each version, with the complexity and with the complete testing, taking about a week. Am I right to say that, sir?
If you take the total cost of $41 million—which is to date, which is not $54 million—and you look only at the development costs of roughly about $10 million, that's going to be less than 60 cents a day.
Let's say, for 20 cents per transaction, we ensured, during the pandemic as changes were coming in, that we saved so many lives. Without these measures and vaccines and the others, we could have put more Canadians at risk.
Thank you for that.
Now I want to go into the evolution of the sophistication of the application during those 18 months. Can you give us some idea of where we started to where we ended up, based on those 70 requirements? What level of sophistication did you see?
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I think that's an excellent question.
As I mentioned, at the beginning it was simply contact tracing and the ability to get basic traveller information to the provinces. Eventually we added the capture of pre-arrival testing—PCR, rapid testing or whatever it was at the time. We put that in, and eventually the vaccine certificates.
Every country did it completely differently. For some countries, it was very basic optical character recognition. It would be uploaded, and we would capture that it was, for example, a Moderna vaccine. There was some basic information there for us. Others were much more sophisticated.
As I said earlier, because of the QR code that we had with provincial health care authorities in Canada, we had a very high degree of confidence in that information, and many Canadians came across the border and were never asked for—
I'd like to begin by thanking the committee for inviting me to discuss the ArriveCAN application.
ArriveCAN cost too much to build. Canadians should be angry, not because of the cost, but because of what our inability to deliver good technology quickly means for the future of our society.
This Thanksgiving, a couple of tech firms cloned the ArriveCAN app’s front end to show that its development was too expensive. As it has been pointed out, this PR stunt doesn't prove much about the cost of the program, because it takes more than copying a few screens to run a border.
ArriveCAN had to be invented in the first place, and deployed, hosted and backed up. As we have heard, just the hosting fees for running it for a year and a half cost $4 million. It had to be updated constantly during that time. It needed to connect to passport, medical and travel databases. Thousands of people from coast to coast to coast had to be trained in the middle of a global public health crisis.
ArriveCAN teams faced so many bureaucratic hurdles, outdated rules and legacy systems—en deux langues—that it’s amazing the app was built at all, let alone in a month. Few people are comparing the cost to the alternatives—face-to-face manual processes during a pandemic, or shutting down the border entirely—but it was still much too expensive.
ArriveCAN cost so much because we do not have a digital government. While some of the ArriveCAN criticism may be a thinly veiled protest about vaccine mandates or public health measures, most of it is warranted, because our public sector is falling behind in its ability to deliver reliable and accessible technology on time and on budget.
Each year, the UN publishes an assessment of digital government across its 193 member nations. In 2010, Canada ranked third in the world. This year, we’re 32nd. We should be angry because our government is unable to deliver superb information technology quickly and affordably.
Canadians already spend nearly eight hours a day online. We are fluent in apps, living on the web and connected in our classrooms and our cars. We sleep by our phones. They’re the first thing we check every morning. We are always connected, with a screen in every pocket, just 15 years after the iPhone was introduced. We are quickly becoming, at least partly, a digital species. In the next century, we will fundamentally rethink everything about government, from how residents interact with public services to how we choose our leaders. A hundred years from now, our government will be as unrecognizable to us as modern democracy is to the monarchy. We are changing, and the government is not adapting alongside us.
While on the outside, the government looks like the thing that builds roads, tests cars, checks crops, staffs service desks, protects coastlines and, yes, chairs committees, at its core the government deals in information. The government ushered in the mainframe, the Internet and satellites. The government is information technology.
As chair of the world’s leading conference on digital government and public sector modernization, I have had the chance to speak with the national CIOs from dozens of countries, including many that now outrank us on the UN’s digital government assessment. In those countries, people brag about the amazing apps they’re building for their fellow citizens. Innovation and experimentation are celebrated. New graduates want to work in government technology. However, here in Canada, we are stumbling into the digital age.
The answer is not more outsourcing. There’s plenty of room for public-private sector collaboration on the utility parts of computing and technology, such as cloud computing, broadband or off-the-shelf software. I don’t want a government to be a hollowed-out shell of policy-makers and bureaucrats, completely dependent on the private sector for its operation. We cannot abdicate the reinvention of our society to others. The government must code.
Fixing this problem will take real, meaningful changes in compensation, culture, training and, yes, the replacement of those who can’t or won’t adapt. Many of these changes are politically unappealing, but they are also necessary.
The hard truth is that we live in a digital society and we deserve a digital government. ArriveCAN is a canary in the digital coal mine, warning us that we are unprepared, unwilling or unable to adapt to that new reality.
Mr. Chair, my objective with these remarks is to not to give you an exhaustive explanation of why ArriveCAN cost so much, but to frame this conversation in a broader context.
I was invited here because of my background in technology start-ups and my role as the founder of a digital government conference.
I will be pleased to answer any questions from the committee members.
[Translation]
Thank you.
My name's David Hutton and I'm a senior fellow with the Centre for Free Expression at Toronto Metropolitan University. I offered myself as a witness because I felt that my particular experience might enable me to offer a useful perspective.
As a young engineer, I led the quality assurance of large, complex computer systems by monitoring the development process, conducting independent testing and approving a final release. Later, as a management consultant, I led my own consulting practice for 20 years, conducting in-depth audits of the management systems of over 100 organizations around the world. For the past 17 years, I've been assisting public interest whistle-blowers and advocating better protection for them. Typically, these are honest employees who speak up about wrongdoing and are punished for doing so.
These three apparently quite different careers have something in common: a quest for truth and integrity so that organizations can deal with facts and reality, making them more successful and also serving the public interest.
I think one of the central questions facing this committee is what happened with respect to ArriveCAN, on a spectrum ranging from a reasonable outcome and value for money, given a fast-changing emergency situation, through contractors taking advantage of a difficult situation opportunistically but perhaps entirely legally, to, at the far end, corruption or collusion through which laws or codes of conduct were violated.
This is difficult to find out, especially if there are wrongdoers who will do their utmost to hide their misdeeds. Based on my experience and research, if we had even half-decent whistle-blower protection in this country, this committee would very likely soon have the answers.
Let me explain.
Given the cost of this project, hundreds of people must have been involved as public servants and contractors. If there was any wrongdoing, then some of them would certainly know. However, they have no safe way to provide this information to the committee or to the public, as there's no protection from career-ending reprisals for speaking up.
That's because Canada has literally the worst protection law in the world. It is supposed to protect about 400,000 public servants, but in 15 years of operation at a cost of more than $100 million, not a single whistle-blower has ever been protected.
This system also completely failed to detect the impending Phoenix pay disaster, even though hundreds of people knew about the problems. Let me share some relevant information about Phoenix as an instructive example.
With my background, you can understand that I was absolutely rivetted by that project. How was it possible that such bad software could be written and released, untested and without any fallback, into a mission-critical role where it would dispense billions of dollars and directly impact the lives of hundreds of thousands of employees?
I read the detailed reports that were available from many sources, but ended up with more questions than answers. I decided to conduct my own investigation, assisted by the Centre for Free Expression.
We set up secure channels of communication and called for insiders to share their experiences confidentially. A few responded, and now I have my answers, which I hope to publish in due course, though I need more sources to corroborate what I learned. This is difficult, because people are terrified to say anything, even those who are retired, years after the event.
My story illustrates two things. Number one, whistle-blowers are by far the best source of information to uncover any wrongdoing that may exist in an organization. Decades of research confirm this. Number two, without protection, very few people will dare to come forward with vital information. That's the situation that the committee finds itself in today.
This is a long-standing problem that affects the work of this committee and all oversight bodies. One obvious solution is to implement proper federal whistle-blower protection, as this committee unanimously recommended in 2017.
Because of its track record and mandate, this committee is uniquely placed to help solve this problem. If you succeed, this will help clarify the true status of many projects, from Phoenix to ArriveCAN.
Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Hutton and Mr. Croll, for your time with us here this afternoon.
Mr. Croll, I really welcome your suggestion about how to bring our government even further into the digital age and be a leader in terms of digital government.
Before we talk about that, I really appreciated the article that you published a couple of weeks ago, entitled “ArriveCAN hot takes miss the point”. I thought it was really illuminating. There was a part in the article under the heading “What it takes to build an app in government”. I think a lot of folks at home may not understand the differences between an app built by a private sector company for the private sector and what a government is responsible for when it's building an app. There are obligations and things a government app needs to make sure are working and cross-referenced. The apps aren't the same. There's a private sector app and then there's a government app.
Can you talk about the differences in terms of some of the obligations and responsibilities that a government-built app has to tick off?
The first thing you have to do with any application is design it.
In 2020, there was no COVID border app to copy, so ArriveCAN had to be invented. The design process itself is difficult because you have many stakeholders. You have to understand how they are going to use the application and make sure that you've met their needs.
There's governance. You have to respect users' rights. Ironically, many of the most vocal critics of ArriveCAN are also vocal critics of government overreach and invasions of privacy. They should be happy that we are spending so much time protecting their rights, particularly with medical data, passport data and travel data—some of the most precious data there is.
We have to train people on how to use software. It's not magic. Everybody here had to learn how to use Teams in six weeks. Learning ArriveCAN had to happen across thousands of employees in real time, during a global pandemic. They had to be trained with each new version of that software.
Private companies don't necessarily have to do that. They're also not trying to use those applications in degraded conditions. By definition, every user of ArriveCAN was going to use the app and then turn on airplane mode. It's call “airplane mode” for a reason, so your app is naturally going to disconnect. The testing and the edge cases are very difficult, and so far, that's true for public and for private companies, but hen you get into government, you get into much more governance, in part because of accessibility requirements. If you call up TribalScale or Lazer and say that you want an app and, by the way, you would like it to be accessible, they are going to add a line item. Do you want it to work with screen readers? That's going to cost you more. Do you want it to work with other phones and all these different platforms for accessibility?
Government doesn't have the luxury of targeting the lucrative middle. Government applications are for everyone. That's a much wider range of development, testing and coverage.
There are also issues of interoperability in working across jurisdictions. There's even language. I'm not just talking about translation; if one misplaced pronoun gets somebody upset, then a member of Parliament is going to get yelled at and a public servant is going to get thrown under the bus. Every word has to be scrutinized, when in fact it should just be a matter of fixing it in the next release.
Government is under this sort of scrutiny. Perfect may be the enemy of good enough, but government doesn't have the option of good enough.
Obviously we talked a lot about procurement, meaning the outsourcing and the markups and so on. Those are legitimate issues. The lesson here should not be that government should outsource more efficiently; it should be that governments should know how to build apps. We should be in charge of our own future. If you just look at the markups that we're paying by not having a robust public sector that's technology-smart, that explains a significant portion of these costs.
Finally, I think there are deployments and backups. When you're building a software application, you have to build a sandbox to build the next version. You have to build a system that can be replicated. You need a backup plan. If this stops working, there are literally thousands of people in transit who can't arrive in the country. A private company that delivers an app doesn't have to deal with 10,000 people lined up at the Dorval airport who are wondering how to get into the country.
I think it's disingenuous to try to compare the two.
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Gosh, that's almost incalculable.
I would call to mind Phoenix and the $2.4 billion and counting—and it still doesn't work, by the way. That was a situation that was well known to hundreds of people, almost everyone who was directly involved in the project. There was a catchphrase, “Everything going well with Phoenix”, which was ironic and was in common use, yet I believe and have evidence that the Integrity Commissioner was given credible warnings about the management of that project, and there was no investigation.
There's $2.4 billion right there.
Now, the public service spends about a billion dollars every working day. I don't know how much of that is wasted or stolen, but it's probably significant. Anyone who's a professional fraud examiner will tell you that there's corruption everywhere. All organizations experience it, and it's just simply a matter of how quickly you can find it and detect it. We have no system for detecting that.
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Well, I will move on with another question for you.
In your opening statement, you said that in 12 years we've fallen from third to 32nd in the UN's assessment of digital government. We're obviously going in the wrong direction in regard to what you would say needs to happen with government becoming a digital government.
I agree with you, especially when I think about what we heard in earlier testimony in regard to the procurement of the ArriveCAN app, knowing that there were three companies identified as the companies that could potentially do this. Then I was surprised to hear that a company like GC Strategies, which subcontracts all the work for an application, took a cut of somewhere between 15% to 30%, and we cannot get any information on the subcontracting. That is deeply concerning to me, because governments need to be transparent and accountable when it comes to the expenditures of Canadians' money.
I guess I would also say that this undoubtedly increases the price of the contracts to government. Not only do we not have access to who these contractors are, but now we also know it's costing more.
I'm wondering if you believe the government can create an effective in-house capability or, at the very least, if they should be contracting with IT firms that can do the work themselves in order to save the taxpayers' money.
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It was Thanksgiving weekend. They all decided to stick around for the weekend and do it. I don't think people were in a similar situation in March or April 2020.
This shop already has access in both cases to version control software, existing cloud-hosting accounts, tools for integrated development environments, tools like Slack, or whatever else. They're already set up to do this stuff. They probably have Figma for user interface design.
Once you have a pipeline like that, you don't have to recreate it from scratch for a new project. When you're cobbling together dozens of subcontractors across firms, often through third party intermediaries, the overhead of managing and maintaining that process versus what we have within Canada in the Canadian Digital Service and other places, you're already paying a markup just to get the system to work.
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The CDS is our best attempt to do that at the moment.
The way I would explain it is like Lego. If you're trying to build something out of Lego, you have component pieces that you can put together to build a house fairly quickly. Our government already has applications like GC Notify, which is a tool that will send out notifications very simply. In fact, at FWD50 this year, they built a notification system in an hour.
We have another one for forms. If you have a form you want to fill out, you use the form tool that we've built. It's automatically accessible, translated and easy to use. It complies with all laws. We have another one for sending out, for example, translation and so on. You build these building blocks, and once you have that foundation, you can very quickly create new pieces of technology on top of it.
For example, we had a speaker from Ukraine. She's the Ukrainian liaison to the European Union for their digital government. Ukraine has leapt forward in the digital government rankings, despite the fact that they're at war. They have a technology that allows every citizen to be identified by looking at their phone. We don't have a unified digital identity. As you can imagine, being able to log into a system is the first requirement for being able to use it properly. However, in Ukraine, that same tool was quickly repurposed to report war crimes or to report attacks.
Once you have these building blocks, you can build new things on top of them, but we are not investing in consistent, reusable building blocks. The Westminster model encourages each department to build its own things in its little fiefdom, rather than defining what is a common feature, like a notification or a form, and saying, “This is what we're going to use, and everyone is going to use it”, making it awesome and then letting people quickly build things on top of it as experiments, and when those experiments don't work, taking them back, rather than facing criticism.
Taiwan has a parallel digital government portal. On every page that you go to on Taiwan's website, you can replace “GOV” with “G0V” and see their beta of the current website. You can go and try it, and if it works, they'll make it mainstream. That's a very big difference from our approach.
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I'll do my best to answer in French.
First of all, I would say that it's because of the advancement of other countries in relation to Canada. Many other countries have made progress, such as England and Ukraine, for example. The notes I provided contain a lot of information on the subject. There are also some rather surprising research results.
There are also problems in Canada related to provincial jurisdictions. Since most identification is done through the health insurance plan or driver's licences, it's difficult to have a single federal identification system. It's incredible.
We trust Google, Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn to log in, but that's not possible with our country. In fact, the government is the only one that owes us something and that has a legal process. I can't talk to Mark Zuckerberg and tell him that he gave me login information and that he shouldn't have done that.
We really need to come to the conclusion that the world is in the digital age and our country is in the digital age. Our services have to be digital first. That doesn't mean we're going to leave behind people who don't embrace the digital environment, but digital systems are more efficient. More research can be done on a digital platform. The login information is there, and it's easier to go and see what happened in a session than in a conversation between two humans.
I think there are a lot of reasons to invest in this, but some government employees don't want their department to be forced to keep up with the technology and expense associated with a common application.
It's time for Canada to speed up the process and resume its place.
My mom was a public servant, and I saw first-hand the sacrifice and how much she cared about her fellow countrymen. It was just amazing.
The made a statement on June 12, 2022, during National Public Service Week. He said, “the government is taking steps to foster a more inclusive public service”. Thinking and hearing about all this, I would feel it's not a safe or inclusive workplace when you're in fear and when there's nowhere to turn.
Mr. Hutton, perhaps you can speak about what kind of workplace this is, given these results, when there's nowhere to go. Over 50% of the public service workers who are off work are there because of mental health issues. Do you believe that this is contributing to it?
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I think there are a lot of factors here.
We know from research that whistle-blowing doesn't take place in some organizations because there's such an open environment and competent management. When wrongdoing is reported to your boss, it just gets dealt with and there are no repercussions. It's not even called whistle-blowing.
In an environment that's very hierarchical, where there's a fear to report any bad news upwards and there's a significant amount of harassment existing as a problem, then whistle-blowing mechanisms are required. They are not going to fix this, but they will help to avoid some of the harm because whistle-blowing can act as an early warning and prevent major problems from spiralling out of control.
There's no reason in the world that Phoenix should have lasted beyond the first year of its operation, yet it went on for years and was ultimately released. It's mind-boggling.
On the larger picture of the atmosphere in the public service, I have opinions, but I don't have direct experience, so I'll pass—