OGGO Committee Meeting

Notices of Meeting include information about the subject matter to be examined by the committee and date, time and place of the meeting, as well as a list of any witnesses scheduled to appear. The Evidence is the edited and revised transcript of what is said before a committee. The Minutes of Proceedings are the official record of the business conducted by the committee at a sitting.

For an advanced search, use Publication Search tool.

If you have any questions or comments regarding the accessibility of this publication, please contact us at accessible@parl.gc.ca.

Previous day publication Next day publication

37th PARLIAMENT, 2nd SESSION

Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates

EVIDENCE

CONTENTS

Tuesday, February 4, 2003

1535

The Chair (Mr. Reg Alcock (Winnipeg South, Lib.))

Mr. Robert Lanctôt (Châteauguay, BQ)

The Chair

1540

Ms. Michelle d'Auray (Chief Information Officer, Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat)

1545

1550

1555

1600

The Chair

Mr. Ken Epp (Elk Island, Canadian Alliance)

Ms. Michelle d'Auray

Mr. Ken Epp

1605

Ms. Michelle d'Auray

Mr. Ken Epp

Ms. Michelle d'Auray

Mr. Ken Epp

Ms. Michelle d'Auray

Mr. Ken Epp

Ms. Michelle d'Auray

Mr. Ken Epp

Ms. Michelle d'Auray

Mr. Ken Epp

1610

Ms. Michelle d'Auray

The Chair

Ms. Michelle d'Auray

The Chair

Mr. Robert Lanctôt

Ms. Michelle d'Auray

1615

Mr. Robert Lanctôt

Ms. Michelle d'Auray

Mr. Robert Lanctôt

Ms. Michelle d'Auray

Mr. Robert Lanctôt

Ms. Michelle d'Auray

Mr. Robert Lanctôt

Ms. Michelle d'Auray

1620

Mr. Robert Lanctôt

Ms. Michelle d'Auray

Mr. Robert Lanctôt

Ms. Michelle d'Auray

The Chair

Mr. Robert Lanctôt

The Chair

Mr. Robert Lanctôt

The Chair

Mr. Pat Martin (Winnipeg Centre, NDP)

Ms. Michelle d'Auray

1625

Mr. Pat Martin

Ms. Michelle d'Auray

Mr. Pat Martin

Ms. Michelle d'Auray

Mr. Pat Martin

Ms. Michelle d'Auray

Mr. Pat Martin

Ms. Michelle d'Auray

1630

Mr. Pat Martin

The Chair

Ms. Carolyn Bennett (St. Paul's, Lib.)

Ms. Michelle d'Auray

Ms. Carolyn Bennett

1635

Ms. Michelle d'Auray

Ms. Carolyn Bennett

Ms. Michelle d'Auray

Ms. Carolyn Bennett

Ms. Michelle d'Auray

The Chair

Mr. Paul Szabo (Mississauga South, Lib.)

1640

Ms. Michelle d'Auray

Mr. Paul Szabo

Ms. Michelle d'Auray

Mr. Paul Szabo

1645

The Chair

Mr. Paul Szabo

The Chair

Mr. Paul Szabo

The Chair

Mr. Paul Szabo

Mr. Ken Epp

The Chair

Ms. Michelle d'Auray

1650

The Chair

Mr. Tony Tirabassi (Niagara Centre, Lib.)

Ms. Michelle d'Auray

1655

The Chair

Mr. Ken Epp

Ms. Michelle d'Auray

Mr. Ken Epp

Ms. Michelle d'Auray

Mr. Ken Epp

Ms. Michelle d'Auray

Mr. Ken Epp

Ms. Michelle d'Auray

Mr. Ken Epp

Ms. Michelle d'Auray

The Chair

1700

Hon. Andy Scott (Fredericton, Lib.)

Ms. Michelle d'Auray

The Chair

Mr. Robert Lanctôt

1705

Ms. Michelle d'Auray

The Chair

Mr. Paul Forseth (New Westminster—Coquitlam—Burnaby, Canadian Alliance)

1710

Ms. Michelle d'Auray

Mr. Paul Forseth

The Chair

Mr. Pat Martin

1715

Ms. Michelle d'Auray

Mr. Pat Martin

Ms. Michelle d'Auray

Mr. Pat Martin

Ms. Michelle d'Auray

Mr. Pat Martin

Ms. Michelle d'Auray

Mr. Pat Martin

Ms. Michelle d'Auray

The Chair

Mr. Pat Martin

Ms. Michelle d'Auray

Mr. Pat Martin

Ms. Michelle d'Auray

Mr. Pat Martin

The Chair

Ms. Michelle d'Auray

1720

The Chair

Ms. Michelle d'Auray

The Chair

Ms. Michelle d'Auray

1725

The Chair

Ms. Michelle d'Auray

The Chair

Ms. Michelle d'Auray

The Chair

CANADA

Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates

NUMBER 008

2nd SESSION

37th PARLIAMENT

EVIDENCE

Tuesday, February 4, 2003

[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]

¹ (1535)

[English]

The Chair (Mr. Reg Alcock (Winnipeg South, Lib.)): Let's come to order.

As members will know from our discussion yesterday, the President of the Treasury Board and the Clerk of the Privy Council had both agreed to meet with us. They were originally scheduled for today. Given that there is a little thing called a budget coming up and both of them are a tad preoccupied with that, we have agreed to hold their presentations until after the presentation of the budget, out of courtesy. In exchange they have offered up Madame D'Auray.

Perhaps bias is the wrong word to use, but I've known Madame D'Auray for some time. I've met with her several times on these issues. She is the chief information officer for the entire government, and has an enormous job ahead of her. She has been doing a superb job to date. So we're looking forward to hearing from her on where we're at, where we're going, and the things a committee of this sort needs to become engaged with.

Mr. Lanctôt, do you have a question before we begin?

[Translation]

Mr. Robert Lanctôt (Châteauguay, BQ): On a point of order, Mr. Chairman, before we get under ay, I apologize to our witness.

Today, we received an e-mail from Ms. Jocelyne Bourgon about the National Conference on Leadership, which will be held on a Monday and Tuesday. Ms. Bourgon is someone who is very well informed about our committee's work, and I am wondering why we sometimes go so far outside the country to take part in this type of conference in various parts of the world. That costs the taxpayers money, and involves a lot of travel. There will be a conference held on February 17 and 18 at Leamy Lake, in Hull, and our committee was invited to attend. However, we know very well that if the committee has not made arrangements to travel, and if we receive individual invitations, we will not be going, because we have our parliamentary work to do here.

I am therefore wondering why our committee does not take part in this conference, particularly given that the subcommittee worked yesterday evening from 5:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. We finished at 9:30 p.m., but it was nevertheless considered a four-hour meeting on public service renewal. But here there is a conference on this very subject, and we are not involved. I would therefore like to know whether we will be attending. I raise the issue because this conference could be quite interesting.

[English]

The Chair: Thank you for raising that. This is the first I've heard of it, so I have either not seen my mailer or not been included in the circulation of it. The problem we have as a committee is that even though this is not considered travel to Europe, moving outside the precinct of the Hill as a committee requires approval of the House.

If you will give me a copy of that, we'll get the clerk to look at that immediately and see whether it's possible to facilitate some involvement on the part of the committee, particularly if Madame Bourgon is requesting it. I certainly think it would be useful for us to take advantage of these opportunities.

So if you can get it to me we'll have the clerk look at it. Then we can come back if we need to form a motion or anything at a later date. We have a few days in which to do it anyway.

Thank you for bringing that to our attention.

Madame D'Auray.

¹ (1540)

Ms. Michelle d'Auray (Chief Information Officer, Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat): Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you for indicating that this was a bit short notice. The clerk asked me if I had prepared notes, and I waved the old scribbled notes. Even though I made notes in my Blackberry, because I have a time span on it I had to keep entering my password, so I wrote them out.

[Translation]

What I thought I would do today, with your permission, is outline briefly for you the responsibilities of the Chief Information Officer, with particular attention to the initiatives we are tracking and coordinating very closely, namely, Government On-Line. Then I thought I would spend a few minutes talking about the importance of IT in the functioning of government. I will not go on at length with these opening remarks, but I simply want to give you a sense of the role, functions, and importance of IT, one of my priorities.

[English]

There are four functions to the role of the chief information officer in its current situation. The first stems from a more traditional role, which is the oversight or stewardship of information management and information technology assets of the Government of Canada. This includes the policies that govern the use of information technology, standards and approaches to large projects or any projects of a certain level that are put forward by departments. The role sits within the Treasury Board Secretariat, and therefore there is a direct link between the approval process that departments go through and the Treasury Board as a committee of cabinet, for some of their projects or initiatives.

The second function, which is a bit more recent but flows from the first, is the responsibility for the coordination and the oversight of the government online initiative for the government as a whole. We have a target or a deliverable date of 2005 for that.

The third function, which was added in April of this fiscal year, is the responsibility for the service improvement initiative. Its goal or target is to improve the percentage of citizen or user satisfaction with government services by 2005.

The fourth component is the functional relationship with or responsibility for the professional group of IT specialists within the Government of Canada, as well as the information management professionals and service delivery professionals, who were recently added.

So in essence, while the core is still the information technology and the use of information technology within the government, or the sound management of the IT assets, it has extended quite substantially into the broader area of service delivery and how the government uses information and communications technology to improve services to Canadians--if I can put it that simply.

I believe the shift occurred in large part as a result of the work my predecessors did quite systematically on the Y2K initiative. The importance and the recognition of technology happened quite significantly as a result of that. At the same time, government online as a priority was included in the connecting Canadians agenda. So there was a move to use technology not just to help Canadians connect and improve their knowledge of the Internet--connect schools, connect communities; there was also a component to help the government be part of that transition in Canadian society. Government online was established as a priority in the 1999 Speech from the Throne.

The mandate is actually quite simple. It is to have the government most connected to its citizens by putting all of its services online by 2005. The original date was 2004, but it was moved to 2005 as a result of some of the public security initiatives that involved a number of the same departments we were working with.

I think many of you will know and recognize the drivers. In fact, you have them in your background paper for the study for this committee. They include increasing use of the Internet, but more specifically improving services and using technology to reach Canadians faster--to be able to deliver services to them faster and be more effective and efficient in our reach. This is also about saving time and costs for businesses and Canadians, and dealing with the demographic shift both inside the public service and outside in the broader society.

There are increasing demands on government services. At the same time, there is increasing potential in the public service, as we look at the age brackets, of losing people but at the same time being asked to provide similar if not increased levels of service. So technology becomes a very useful tool in achieving improvement in service but also in dealing with some of the shifts in our demographics internally.

¹ (1545)

[Translation]

For those who are not familiar with the statistics, and I will not mention many of them, close to 70 per cent of Canadians use the Internet regularly. Our average use rate is 9 to 10 hours a week, which makes us one of the most connected countries in the world. We use the Internet for all sorts of reasons—to get information, to travel, but particularly in dealing with the government, to take advantage of the wealth of information we have available.

Our Government On-Line initiative is organized around two of the principles that are absolutely fundamental to everything we do. The first is to put the focus on the user.

[English]

In English we use the term “user-centric”. That is one of the two guiding principles of everything we do in our government online initiative. The second is we take a whole-of-government view.

[Translation]

Our aim is to make available to users, who are at the centre of this government machinery, all the programs and services available. However, we want users to be able to have access to this information intuitively, without having to be experts in our structure.

[English]

Those two governing principles, user-centricity and whole of government, are very difficult to achieve because we are not necessarily organized that way; we are organized by departments, by programs, by activities. But those two guiding principles have made Canada the success that it is and given it the recognition it has received worldwide for its online initiative in its approach to service delivery.

On the services and how we have organized ourselves, we've essentially done it by group of user--individual Canadians, Canadian businesses, and people outside Canada--and we have subject areas under each one of those main gateways or entry points. All of the government, if you will--maybe simplistically--is organized under each one of those three gateways. So all the services and information are grouped under those.

In terms of the services we have online, we have quite a few and we have quite a good take-up. You could argue whether or not filing your taxes online is a service--it could be seen as a service to the government--but at least you can do it faster and fairly effectively. We had about 2.3 million Canadians filing last year electronically, which is one of the highest rates in the world. We expect that to be as high if not much higher this year.

The Chair: Out of how many?

Ms. Michelle d'Auray: That's 2.3 million out of about 12 million. But a number of them also filed by phone, so if you count phone and electronic, it's 6 million.

We also have a number of offerings for business. For example, if you want to register a business or file a patent, it can be done electronically. If you want to incorporate, the process by mail takes you about a week. If you do it online it can take about twenty minutes. So there is significant ease of use, ease of relationship, if you will, and services.

We also have a component we call the infrastructure piece, which looks at building a common electronic platform for government services. Its major component is called the secure channel, which is both a network service--an ability to authenticate or validate who you are with the government when you're online--and a directory service, a service for calling a broker, who basically acts as an intermediary to connect you to different services.

We also have developed a fair number of policies and standards. That's the third component. For example, we initiated the privacy impact assessment policy, where departments are required to do an impact assessment on the privacy of moving services online, of integrating more than one service, or changing a major program.

We also have what we call an information management or management of government information holdings policy that gives us the standards by which we tag or identify pieces of information so they can be re-used. I don't mean personal data, but information about programs, services, and activities that we can re-use across a variety of services.

We also have a fairly extensive communication and feedback activity, which is the fourth component of what we do under the government online initiative. We have an Internet-based panel of about 4,500 Internet users we consult on a quarterly basis to find out whether what we are doing makes sense. They can test some of our offerings and they give us immediate feedback. We also do a fair amount of focus group testing. We validate the structure of our services. We also do something that is very hard for governments to do--we actually make decisions based on that.

So some clusters or groupings of services have been re-engineered and moved into another cluster or organizational structure on the web in order to deal with the citizen preference that changes over time. Anything about an Internet-based service moves and changes, because people adapt to the technology of the information as they use it differently over time. Keeping an iterative change within a government service is something that is also very challenging, so using technology that is Internet-based allows us to make those changes.

¹ (1550)

The fifth component of our initiative deals with human resources. We've done fairly extensive work with the information technology professionals in the government in order to understand what some of the core competencies and skill sets are so we can meet some of those challenges when we recruit.

We are now starting to do that in terms of information professionals and information management professionals, and we're starting to do that for service delivery professionals, because--and I'll get into this in a bit--as we increasingly change and use the Internet-based and web-based services as a means for us to provide services, we are changing our business processes within the government. This means that in moving away from data entry as people enter their own information directly into our databases, we don't need people to rekey the information. But we do need people to be able to answer questions, to be able to deal with calls on the telephone, to be able to answer e-mails and respond to information requests, and to be able to provide more over-the-counter service, in-person service.

That's another aspect we need to look at, how we deal with service delivery across all three channels. We can move part of the population, and some are pretty aggressive about moving to online services. Once they find one, they use it fairly fast. Others will have a longstanding reluctance to move to the Internet, and in order for us to be able to provide the quality and richness of service a web- or phone-based service can do, it means we have to train people differently. We have to give them access to the information so that when people walk in a government office they have a range of access to the whole set of information, which is not always the case today. Keeping in balance those three service delivery arms is really important to us as well.

When we looked at what the impact in government was--I gave you a tiny example of it where you're moving from data entry to be able to offer a richer type of employment for the employee and a different service offering for the citizen--we also looked at what the common business processes across the government are. We issue a number of licences and permits. Are there some common processes we can develop rather than reinventing the wheel every single time we want to move a service online? What about common publishing tools? We publish a fair amount of information. Can we develop common publishing tools so we all use the same process?

It sounds in a way like very small steps. It sounds almost intuitive that we should do that. But in each department or agency in a lot of programs, we have a lot of people doing those things over and over again. If we were to move to common platforms and processes, that would also make the government change in its own processes, in its own way of looking at information that is in fact to be reused, to be replicated in a number of departments. Departments at that point can use the information for more than one purpose. The generator of that information can see the information used across a variety of websites and web services.

You then start to deal with the authoritativeness of the information so you know the source of it. Again, this sounds very theoretical, but some of the impact of that is very real on how we work and on how we provide services--and I keep coming back to that--to Canadians.

Some of the processes as well are useful for us internally. So what could be new? We could, for example, create an employee portal or gateway, where all single sign-ons for employees, all of the permissions, and all their work tools would be there. Learning tools, travel, and purchasing could all go online but could be done so in an integrated fashion so it could have an impact on us as well. We're looking at some of those.

We could also ask, as we move to common administrative services across the government, can we rethink how we do our own internal administration? In terms of what's next if we go down that road, it means that we have to start looking at a common, what we call an enterprise-wide look at the Government of Canada for its information architecture. That means how it's organized and the technology platform. It also means looking at what the common business processes are. What do we do that's the same, and what is the information technology that could support it on an integrated basis? That then gets us to look at how we spend our money right now on information technology.

¹ (1555)

The Government of Canada spent $5.1 billion last fiscal year, and that includes people, technology, software, and hardware. It does so on a base but also incrementally by project. We make most of our changes by implementing information technology projects to launch a program, policy, or service or in order to do a major upgrade.

The $5.1 billion represents just over 10% of operating expenditures in the government. For some corporations or some entities that's pretty low. Some go as high as 20%, and you could argue that in some ways, because a huge amount of what the government does runs on information technology, that is not as high as it should be. I'll give you an example. You may question productivity levels, but we exchange within the Government of Canada six million e-mails a day. That's how we do our business. It's all electronic.

We have 15,000 IT professionals, the fastest-growing group of people in the public service. In some ways we are also very similar to the private sector, in that our success rate in projects is about the same. We succeed in about 25% of them and so do they. We also work very closely with the private sector. Quite a number of the CIOs in the government, if you were to go around to departments and agencies, are actually executives interchanged from the private sector.

We outsource a fair amount of our IT business--help desks, data centres, and network centres--to the private sector. We have a very longstanding relationship with vendors but with also key individuals. We have a fairly symbiotic relationship. People come into the government, work, and then go back out.

A lot of the people we tend to take for CIO-type activities in the public service come from the financial sector because, again, there are quite a few similarities. Love them or not, banks have physical locations. They have a lot of telephone services and they run their business on information technology. They are across the country. They offer services in both official languages. There are lots, and once you have that experience and have been able to manage a large information technology infrastructure, it's not a difficult leap to come into and manage large systems or services in the government.

I'm going to end with how we are doing. On the online services and our online initiative, I think we have been rated twice, two times in a row, as number one in the world. The third-year rating is supposed to be coming out in a couple of months, so we can take bets now. That's just one benchmark, but Canada is consistently rated in the top five. We are rated, I think, at that level because of our governance approach. We do manage this initiative horizontally. We have managed to instill a culture of managing horizontally for this initiative. It is not easy, but it is doable.

The two operating principles, if I can repeat this, are absolutely critical to ensure that change. Our focus is on the end user, the citizen always, and on providing to that citizen all of what the government can offer. When you have those two, it's very difficult to argue against that.

º (1600)

Here's my final thought. There are not a lot of road maps for what we are doing, and it's an interesting experience in risk management because nobody else is doing quite what we're doing. Canada is a world leader, and we get tons of people from around the world coming to see us to find out how we are doing it. It is difficult. The change potential is enormous. We are breaking ground on almost a monthly basis. But it is important, and I think most administrations and most public institutions have recognized this by now. And having a deadline does help.

I'll stop there.

The Chair: Thank you very much.

Members, we shall launch off.

Mr. Epp, would you like to go first?

Mr. Ken Epp (Elk Island, Canadian Alliance): That's a scary thought, for me to launch off here, but....

I'd like to welcome you here. Thank you for coming and sharing your experience and insight.

I have a number of questions that came to mind. One of the first is actually quite serious, though it may be misinterpreted. I'm going to ask it anyway.

A member of Parliament was recently presumed to have botched up the whole government service. His computer services were removed, because all he did was to try to contact all of the civil servants in the organization, by sending one e-mail to each of them.

Now, you talked about six million e-mails per day. I really wonder what happened here. Is it actually possible that sending one e-mail to every member of the civil service would screw up the entire system?

Ms. Michelle d'Auray: I can answer from my own experience at the Treasury Board Secretariat, where a number of our employees received the e-mail. What happens is that if you press the reply button, you reply to everybody to whom that e-mail was sent. So it jammed up the system. That's what happened.

It wasn't specified in the e-mail how you were to respond. So as soon as you pressed the reply, it went to everybody again. So had that replicated over and over again...everybody's system receiving it basically jammed.

Mr. Ken Epp: Is this because the individual receiving it replied by touching “reply all”, instead of “reply”?

º (1605)

Ms. Michelle d'Auray: I can only make that assumption. I know that's what happened in a number of instances, which created huge pressures on our networks. As I said, I can only speak for what I know within our own organization. That's what happened.

Mr. Ken Epp: I presume the government services use Microsoft Outlook for the most part.

Ms. Michelle d'Auray: There's a variety.

Mr. Ken Epp: There is, eh?

Ms. Michelle d'Auray: Yes, there is.

Mr. Ken Epp: Okay. But is it possible when you send something out in these programs to be able to disable...? Let's say the member of Parliament would have been able to put a flag on it disabling the reply-all response.

Ms. Michelle d'Auray: It's possible. But when you received the e-mail, there was no underlying list of people to whom it was sent. So you wouldn't necessarily know.

Mr. Ken Epp: Okay. That's incredible. I didn't realize how that could have happened. But that can happen with anybody?

Ms. Michelle d'Auray: Yes.

Mr. Ken Epp: So it's a serious flaw.

The next question I have has to do with privacy. In the last couple of days, I desperately needed to get into contact with my bank, which happens to be based in Alberta. I could get onto their website, but I couldn't log on personally. It was as if the House of Commons firewall prevented me from talking to my bank. I found this very annoying. I wound up having to phone them and actually talk to them personally, instead of just clicking on my mouse and looking after a little matter.

Is it the intention of the government to prevent people from doing this type of thing in order to provide privacy? Or how how does this work?

Ms. Michelle d'Auray: I don't know how the House of Commons IT infrastructure is established, so I can't answer the question in your particular instance. The House is separate from the public service in its infrastructure and configurations. But from the public service's perspective, I can tell you we do have what we call acceptable use policies for the use of the electronic networks of the government.

We encourage employees to use the Internet. We encourage them to use it for personal learning, finding out how to use it, and for searching. It's a huge information base for us. But we have some very strict rules about what is acceptable and what is not. People are forewarned and we do monitoring. So we don't block access, although we do block access to pornographic and gambling sites. We have some filters. Quite frankly, these are the limits of the blocking we do. But this is for the public service.

I would suggest that if you have a question for the House, you put it to the people who run the House services, because these are two separate things.

Mr. Ken Epp: I should perhaps add, just for the record here, that this had to do with the rent on the apartment here in Ottawa. For some reason my cheque was lost and they didn't get it and so on. So indirectly it was parliamentary business, because I have to stay here and not get kicked out of my apartment if I want to be an MP. I just wanted to check to see whether or not the cheque had run through before I wrote them another one. Anyway, that's a problem there.

Secondly, some of us members of Parliament have a personnel resource problem in terms of responding to the number of e-mails we get now. In our office we get probably 200 e-mails a day, it would be my estimate. It takes a good portion of my staff's time to filter out which of those are spam and which are serious inquiries, and there are other issues involved as well. Some people get upset if you don't answer right away, so you have to try to identify those.

This move to making government more accessible to the people could have a very negative effect in the sense that the end cost is going to be huge. I'll use this example. There's a website available where if you want to send a letter to every member of Parliament, you can take five minutes to type up your letter, click on the button, and automatically it's sent to 300 members of Parliament. They don't even have to type in our individual addresses. So their five minutes of work means presumably 301 members of Parliament have to respond to it. In that sense, the electronic communication with our constituents out there can become a real problem.

Have you given any thought to that type of thing, or are members of Parliament unique in that regard?

º (1610)

Ms. Michelle d'Auray: In terms of volume, they're probably not unique. But I think in terms of the relationship you want to have with your constituents, it's something that is of your design. If you wish to engage electronically with your constituents, there are some very easy tools that allow you to manage. You can get an automatic response that says you'll get back to them in 48 hours or 72 hours, and everybody gets that as soon as they send you an e-mail.

Managing information, whether it comes by mail, electronically, or otherwise, is an issue individuals deal with on a regular basis. In terms of government services, we do have some service standards by which we tell people you will get a response from us in x number of days or x number of hours. It's fairly automatic. We also ask if they want to call us at a certain time, or we can call them back at a certain time when a question is too complex to do electronically. More often than not, people use e-mail to get information, and we point them back to the site. There is quite an extensive series of services we use for that.

The Chair: Thank you.

We'll come around again Ken, don't worry.

You, as the CIO for the government, are not responsible for the House of Commons.

And Ken, I suspect there is another process here that we might want to talk about, because there are some serious concerns about the way the House is managed. Unfortunately, we don't have access to the expertise that Madam d'Auray represents.

Ms. Michelle d'Auray: But you do have a CIO.

The Chair: Yes, we do. But we have our own set of issues, which we will not allow to intrude here, other than to note that they exist.

Monsieur Lanctôt, do you have any questions?

[Translation]

Mr. Robert Lanctôt: Yes, but they will be less personal than the ones asked by my colleague.

You spoke at length about delivering services to people, but I would have liked to hear your views on another interesting topic, particularly since we are going through a time when there are many problems in areas such as firearms or much of the computer information you receive. We do not yet know all the reasons for this huge financial fiasco, but it is probably due in large part to computer systems. In any case, that is what we assume. Was there any false information? Was the information provided correctly? Was this done to cause problems for all the registries? Was the objective of all this to cause you problems? I have no idea, but I hope we will know more in the months ahead. I think we will need all this time to find out what happened in the firearms registry scandal.

I would therefore have liked you to tell us where you are at. You tell us that things are going very, very well, but on the other hand, efforts are being made to change the public service and to start over at square one because things are not going well. You say that as far as you are concerned, things are going well, because you are merely a tool. If that is the case, I fail to see how you can tell us that everything is going well. I think the service you provide will be necessary for accountability. Can you report on your progress in that regard? Are you given statistics on the various departments? Are you told that things are going well? In the case of the performance of the departments, do they come to you, or do they deal with the problems themselves and you later check what has been done? Do you travel around to see them, or do they inform you of the results they are seeking to achieve?

I will stop there, because I have asked a number of questions.

Ms. Michelle d'Auray: When I mentioned we were among the first in the world, I was referring particularly to the Government On-Line initiative. This is the context in which I stressed the importance of citizens, businesses and electronic services.

May I ask you for a clarification? Are you talking about the accountability and performance of each department as regards information technology or in general?

º (1615)

Mr. Robert Lanctôt: My question refers specifically to information technology. We can ask questions of a more general nature of other witnesses. So my question was just about information technology and computer systems.

Ms. Michelle d'Auray: I think that generally speaking, the performance of Canadian government departments as regards computer systems is quite good. However, in areas where there may have been a shortage of funds in past years, there is a regular process of rebalancing and updating going on. So in many cases, we have systems in place that have now become quite outdated and should be replaced. So I would say that there is room for considerable improvement in some of the key Government of Canada systems.

If I may, I would now like to talk about human resources, which are a rather important factor in managing our systems. We have some very good professionals in the IT area. We have been able to hire, particularly during bad times in certain parts of the country, during which companies were laying off a great many employees. So in this regard, we have quite a good range of skills.

In addition to renewing some critical systems, we must work on information management, that is, the way we organize information in order to reuse it and identify it throughout the government.

All public and private institutions are facing the same problems. We have a huge number of sources that produce information. How can we manage, reuse and store this information in archives? These are very important, relevant questions. We are learning from the experience of the private sector in this regard, because we are not the only ones facing these issues.

Mr. Robert Lanctôt: To be more specific, was there a computer systems or information management problem in the case of the firearms registry? Was it simply a human resources problems rather than a software problem, for example? Was it really the wrong information that caused this fiasco, or was there an equipment problem?

Ms. Michelle d'Auray: I think some reports from the firearms registry were tabled yesterday, and I believe Minister Cauchon said that he would be replying in quite specific terms to the recommendations they contain.

With your permission, my answer will focus generally on projects that have an IT component. As far as the firearms registry goes, I would prefer to let the process undertaken by Minister Cauchon unfold at his level.

Mr. Robert Lanctôt: I do not understand. I am not asking you a political question. You are the chief...

Ms. Michelle d'Auray: I will answer your question.

Mr. Robert Lanctôt: You are the Chief Information Officer, and you know that there were two requests regarding the problems that occurred. That is not what I am asking you. You were the officer in charge. Have you had any problems as regards computer systems, equipment, software, or is this merely a question of human resources, in which case the situation will be dealt with at a different level? You should be able to answer that, because you are the person in charge. I am not asking Minister Cauchon to tell me that. He is the Minister of Justice, and he is not the one who will get me the answer. You are in charge of the...

Ms. Michelle d'Auray: I am not responsible for the day-to-day administration of the firearms registry.

º (1620)

Mr. Robert Lanctôt: You should know what is going on in this regard. I cannot believe that you do not know.

Ms. Michelle d'Auray: If I may, I will give a general answer about projects with a significant IT component. All projects evolve, whether they are in the private or public sector. Often, needs change over time. That is true of all projects, because the rules, issues and use practices change. This is inherent in the implementation of any computer system. There is a management system creation component and a significant element involving outside users.

Mr. Robert Lanctôt: You are speaking in general terms. In the specific case of the firearms registry, were there any problems of the type you described?

Ms. Michelle d'Auray: I would prefer to leave it to others...

[English]

The Chair: Excuse me, Michelle.

Monsieur Lanctôt, while I share your interest in this and we have agreed as a committee to become seized of this, I note that Mr. Raymond Hession has just released his report. I think we should indeed call him and the others who were responsible for the management of this project.

I would be a little uncomfortable spending too much time with Madam d'Auray, who is tangentially involved with it, and perhaps losing the benefit of her knowledge. She has said that we succeed in about 25% of them.

[Translation]

Mr. Robert Lanctôt: Mr. Chairman, you may ask all the questions of interest to you, but I am also entitled to ask the questions of interest to me that have something to do with government operations. She is responsible for all information systems, and I am asking her a very specific question about a problem we have at the moment. If you do not want to hear the answers, that is your business, but you cannot tell me what questions to ask. If you have other general questions to ask, that is up to you, but I have not yet received an answer, and I find that unfortunate.

[English]

The Chair: I am not, however, willing to allow us to go after people who do not necessarily carry the responsibility to stand up for people who do.

[Translation]

Mr. Robert Lanctôt: There are eight other members of Parliament who may ask the questions of interest to them, but those are the questions I wanted to ask for the time being. They are specific, but they could certainly be of use to your general study of the issue. I think it is unfortunate that the witness would not answer them.

Is my time up? I will come back later.

[English]

The Chair: Yes, it is.

Mr. Martin.

Mr. Pat Martin (Winnipeg Centre, NDP): Thank you, Mr. Chair, and good afternoon, Madame d'Auray. It's nice to see you again.

From your remarks, I think most Canadians are very proud that Canada is a world leader in their government online and their service improvement initiatives. They've been very well received, by and large. I had the honour of going with the President of the Treasury Board to Naples, where she delivered a keynote address to a conference on this very subject of e-government. It has moved in leaps and bounds since then.

I would like to ask you a general policy question on one recent action by the federal government. It has to do with HRDC and their job bank kiosks. As you may be aware, these access points are available in shopping malls, public libraries, and public places where Canadians can access the job information bank and find out about employment opportunities. So unemployed and underemployed people can go to these places. It was one of the first online initiatives of the government to improve access.

Every member of Parliament has just been informed that as of March 1 all of these kiosks will be removed. The rationale or justification is that people can access that same information on the Internet, and by your figures 69% of Canadians and 82%....

The problem is that in the inner city of Winnipeg people can't even afford telephone lines, never mind Internet subscriptions. There are 16 of these job kiosks. One station alone in the Portage Place Mall gets 40,000 hits a year; the one in the Winnipeg Public Library gets 30,000; and the three Manitoba Family Services centres get 30,000 each. So over 150,000 people are accessing this very simple touch-screen system--unemployed and underemployed people. Now they're arbitrarily pulling them all out with one month's notice.

I know you have to be careful, but would you view this as keeping with the general policy and philosophy of expanding opportunities to access important information? How do you feel about it?

Ms. Michelle d'Auray: I'm not aware of the specific incidents you've mentioned, so my comments are based on my knowledge of access points through the community access sites or public libraries. There you make very interactive job bank searches and make applications directly as you are searching, which is the improvement in the service that is being offered.

So the kiosk offered a part of what we can now offer online, which is to make the direct connection between the job search and the actual application, if you want to.

In terms of the number of CAP sites or public access points for the Internet--I recognize that not everybody has access to the Internet--I don't know the specific number of public access points in Winnipeg, but there are probably as many as if not more than there were public kiosks.

º (1625)

Mr. Pat Martin: There are a lot more, but I went down to observe at the Winnipeg Public Library. The job kiosk was constantly full, but the Internet stations were ten deep because so many inner-city students use the public library Internet sites for homework. They'll tie it up for an hour doing research projects for their homework.

I understand your answer and I understand the rationale, but they cite that it's expensive to maintain these kiosks and everybody can access this stuff anyway. As the chief information officer, I put it to you that it diminishes access to remove these sites. It doesn't seem to be in keeping with the general policy statement you've made, the commitments you've made, and the very ambitious goals you've set out for improving access in the coming years.

Ms. Michelle d'Auray: If I can speak to the technology aspects for a minute, the kiosks are very expensive to maintain as a technology. The solution may be to increase the public access points to the Internet because it's a more interactive technology base. Some of the kiosks were actually closed networks, which meant they were sustained on their own; they weren't tied to the Internet.

Mr. Pat Martin: I think that's true.

Ms. Michelle d'Auray: And therefore, the technology and the flexibility that this allows you is very limited because now--

Mr. Pat Martin: And they told you where the jobs were, essentially. That's what you need to know.

Ms. Michelle d'Auray: Yes, but the Internet tells you where the jobs are as well, and the job search is a lot more sophisticated on the Internet site for the job search and the job bank of HRDC today.

Mr. Pat Martin: But if there were over 40,000 hits on one station alone in the Portage Place Mall in one year, 2001-2002, obviously the need and demand are there. I just flag it for your attention at least.

Madame Robillard had also visited the United Kingdom and some other countries to compare public services and to share and garner or collect experiences regarding e-government. Can you tell me if you gleaned ideas or benefited from sharing information with other countries in establishing your own e-government initiatives? I think you were on that trip, were you not?

Ms. Michelle d'Auray: Not on that specific trip, but we do have a network with my counterparts or equivalents in three or four different countries, and we communicate informally fairly regularly. It's on the net. We also read each other's benchmarking reports or what others say about what happens in other countries.

There are a couple of things and there are a couple of observations I would make. One of them is that it's very difficult to transpose ways and approaches because the cultures of our institutions are very different. There are many similarities with, for example, the Australian government in how we're structured. There are many similarities up to a point with the U.K., but the areas of responsibility in the various functions are not quite the same, so transposing how something is approached is sometimes very difficult.

There are some areas in, for example, Australia where they have moved more aggressively, namely in creating an integrated infrastructure for the government. They have legislated a single business number for all businesses. They have made some approaches we're now examining and are developing business cases for because we were intrigued by what they had done and put forward.

The United States, for example, is doing a huge amount of work on what is known as enterprise-wide architecture. We have spent quite a bit of time with them and we have stolen from each other's work, if I can put it that way. So there is a fairly good cross-pollination of ideas and solutions we share among those who are trying to move and effect government services online or e-government strategies.

Where I think we have been quite successful is in our government structure and in how we've brought people from departments and agencies to work together on how we structured and organized our work. The most visible element of that would be the Canada site, the three gateways, and then the service clusters underneath those. Those have actually stood, in Internet time, the test of time, because they've been up for about three years, which is a long time for net-based structures.

We are now seeing the approaches replicated around the world, but there are some areas, as I said, in terms of enterprise-wide business architecture, in terms of common infrastructure, and in terms of some legislative or some policy areas. There are some good ideas.

º (1630)

Mr. Pat Martin: Thank you.

The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Martin.

Madam Bennett.

Ms. Carolyn Bennett (St. Paul's, Lib.): I am most interested in where you see your job in the government. Having seen the e-envoy's office at Westminster, which reports directly to the Prime Minister, do you think that reporting to Treasury Board is the best way to have a comprehensive approach to e-government?

Ms. Michelle d'Auray: Some days, yes, some days, no. There are some advantages the e-envoy doesn't necessarily have, and there are some advantages the e-envoy has I don't necessarily have. If I can sum it up, it does boil down to the culture of the public institutions and the culture of the governance structures we have, and what works in one doesn't necessarily and wouldn't necessarily work in another.

We have a very collegial approach and a very integrated governance structure, which I would argue has in fact been.... It's more complicated and it's harder to manage, but it actually embeds the change a lot faster and a lot deeper in the organizations. Sometimes centralization does the opposite. It actually creates a layer or a veneer and doesn't actually embed the change within the organizations. I would argue that this is a bit of the difference between the two, the U.K. example and ours.

In the Treasury Board, though, it is the secretariat of the department that supports the management board of government. That is where we do the administrative policies, where we look at what the business processes of government are. It is also where we review expenditures once the policy decisions have been made, so it is a good position from which to examine how government is evolving: what are the good practices, what are the expenditures, and how are they managed? It does have its advantages, because it is the management board of the government, and what we are doing is about changing management processes as well.

I don't know if that answers your question, but if we look at where else we would put it, there are not a lot of other places that have as much impact on how government is managed and on what the administrative policies and practices of the government are as an institution from an administrative perspective.

Ms. Carolyn Bennett: As you know, a lot of us have been concerned about some of the things that cross government departments and about how we manage horizontal issues. I know Treasury Board has been very interested in finding ways of measuring outcomes of things that cross departments.

Do you feel that ICT has been helping with that project in that...? I think that when we were at one of the crossing-boundaries small focus groups there was a concern that getting out of a department to go a meeting that involved other departments sometimes wasn't as high a priority for your immediate boss as doing the work of your department. Are there any examples where some of this collaborative stuff actually happens online? Is that something you could tell us about?

º (1635)

Ms. Michelle d'Auray: You mean instead of physically meeting?

Ms. Carolyn Bennett: Yes.

Ms. Michelle d'Auray: We use quite a number of tools to do that. We also use tools to actually change documents and to do presentations collectively. Yes, we use those tools as well.

Sometimes when we're debating the merits of a particular standard or a particular application, it's easier to bring people into a room and do a demonstration everybody can see and then argue about the new technology. It also generates passion sometimes. We actually do a fair bit electronically without bringing people physically into a room, if that's what you're asking.

On a broader governance basis, if I interpret part of your question correctly, you're asking, if I'm not doing the immediate business of my department, is the work I'm doing horizontally valued? Increasingly, what we are seeing is that the work of the department is actually being integrated or that the core business of the department is in fact the broader service agenda. People are spending time to understand the joined-up or integrated services we can offer business, a process that actually supports the core business of five or six departments because they all have the same end client or end user.

So again, the focus is on who's at the other end receiving the service, and it's the same person, whether you're department X, Y, or Z. Then if we're all together serving that same person, it's actually my core business priorities I'm responding to. That is starting to be ingrained in the way we think and even in the recognition of the work that's happening that is cross-departmental.

Ms. Carolyn Bennett: In terms of e-democracy and e-government, what sharing happens between the consultation process and tools that you have and what we might want for Parliament?

Ms. Michelle d'Auray: Right now, very little, and it's an area that I would say has been under-explored because our focus, as some of your colleagues have pointed out, has been on the delivery of services and understanding how we integrate those services to improve effectiveness, efficiency, and reach.

We will be piloting what we call an e-consultation portal in the next couple of months where, from a very simple base, we are just going to start joining up all of the consultation activities that are launched by ministers or by the government, and people will be able to find them in one place. Part of that is a bit to see whether or not, if I can use an old term, cross-fertilization among consultation processes will emerge.

It's an experiment that is generating a fair amount of interest, because people are concerned as to whether that will increase the volume and whether or not they will be able to respond to it, and what happens if the issues that somebody wants to deal with cover 15 consultations but in one document?

So again, it sounds pretty simplistic, but it is the baby step. On the broader issue, there have been some discussions, some research, but our focus really has been on the service delivery side.

The Chair: Okay, thank you, Madam Bennett.

Mr. Szabo, Mr. Tiribassi, back to Mr. Lanctôt, and then Mr. Epp.

Mr. Paul Szabo (Mississauga South, Lib.): Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Having been the parliamentary secretary to the Minister of Public Works and Government Services, I've been substantially exposed to what happens.

The call centre is absolutely phenomenal, and the number of events I went to where we were showcasing our software, and the interest there. We have been around the world showing what we can do. I have no doubt that most people have reached the same conclusion, that we have developed a very special asset and it's being maintained quite well. I don't think we get a lot of complaints about what's there. I think there are always those who want more.

I suppose we could sit around this table, and we might want to pick away at things like the gun registry, quite specific things, and so on, but as a parliamentarian, I don't want to sit around here and talk platitudes about what wonderful things computers are and how much information....

I would really like to know from you, Madame d'Auray, what message are you bringing to us in terms of what you want us to do? Where should we look? How do we focus ourselves?

Let's get rid of all the fluff and get down to, what business should we do? We're all busy people; tell us what you really want to say to us. Should we be alert somewhere? Should we study something? Should we have a heads-up? I don't want to know about your plans and all this other stuff until you are ready to really do a good job on saying why it's necessary and the costs justified.

We have a situation now. What is the state of the union? Does it work? How can we help you, if you can convince us that we should do something, or are you just here to say the world is pretty good so far?

º (1640)

Ms. Michelle d'Auray: On the question your colleague posed, about engaging citizens--call it e-democracy--citizen engagement is an issue where very little has been done. That is your role, and how you see that evolving in an age or in an environment where increasingly a lot of the answers and a lot of the services will be provided directly.

Mr. Paul Szabo: Okay.

Ms. Michelle d'Auray: That's one area.

Another one would be a sense of whether in fact we are doing that well, because I can tell you, on service delivery on electronic services, things are going well.

You have a different relationship, a different ability to tell us whether.... We think we are doing pretty good on some of the service side. Are we?

On the extent to which you can also help your constituents, this is kind of an interesting point. When we ask people what else we could do differently, it's a very difficult question for people to answer, because we have systematically encouraged people to deal with us program by program, sector by sector.

In my more facetious moments I would say we have 45 years of form-filling ingrained in people, and it's easier for people to deal with us on that basis, but to understand on a broader basis, what else could we do to make people's lives easier? Can we get them to start thinking differently about the government and its services, as opposed to just having to find out what a department or program does? So force us to be more integrated in how we're working and responding to those needs.

Mr. Paul Szabo: I have a sense, okay.

It's e-democracy. That's what I get out of it--how can we better serve the constituents? We know that not everybody has relatively easy access. That should respond to some other realities of members of Parliament, and I think this is a one-directional discussion.

Have you done any work to determine how many members of Parliament have websites that are functional in terms of being able to provide information and communication? I think you're going to find that not even half the MPs have functional websites. So there's no point in pushing e-democracy when we haven't even done the basics. The perfect world is where everybody can just instantaneously communicate.

On top of that, e-mails cause more work. There's certainly more paper. There certainly is more anonymity going on, because anyone who has a problem sends something to you through who knows what e-mail address, and never provides you their name. You don't know whether they're a constituent. You don't know a return address or telephone number. It actually causes you more work.

You don't even know whether you're talking to your own constituent, because they don't identify themselves. And if it's John Smith, well, everybody's got a John Smith in their riding, but if you don't know the address or phone number, you're dead.

Members of Parliament have to look to other tools as well.

So I think e-democracy is a lovely cliché, but democracy and consulting with people is something that each and every member of Parliament does on a daily basis--day to day, week to week, month to month, hour to hour. I get communications in a variety of forms. I determine what priorities are. I respond to those things. For me to say I have a better citizen engagement....

My citizens know what their rights are. If they have a situation, they can communicate with their member of Parliament in a variety of ways--by letter, by fax, or by e-mail to either office. I have people working for me. They can meet me at functions. They know my phone number at home is in the local telephone book. Members of Parliament are actually quite accessible.

But you also have to understand that, for instance, if you're running a survey, you know what the response rate is to surveys. It's terrible. If you get one to three percent, it's the norm. You can't take that as being significant. And I don't know whether or not members of Parliament want to be inundated with...and trying to educate.... You couldn't possibly educate everybody on every issue you wanted input on, so there's an issue with the quality of information you get back.

The next time somebody asks what we're trying to address here, I hope the first thing on the list is not that we have to improve e-democracy. I hope it's for members of Parliament to do their jobs, the job of looking at how this government is doing--the horizontal stuff. Because we can't do that easily. I don't know what we're doing on child poverty across the government. I don't know what we're doing on disability issues across the government. Those things are important. We can't do that easily now. We're very busy there.

I think members of Parliament should be ashamed that 80% of committees don't report the estimates back to the House. Those that do end up having meetings that people use as question period for the minister, and no questions are ever asked on the estimates. Then they're reported back. And if you don't report them back, they're deemed to have been reported back.

We have a gun registry issue, Mr. Chairman, on which the justice committee made no response. It was there. There were no questions. It didn't dawn on them.

So I think it would be nice if you stopped trying to do our constituency work better for us and maybe started helping us to do a better job as parliamentarians, looking at national issues and fiscal account responsibility. E-democracy with my constituents is not the top issue for me. I think I do it very well, and if you don't, you don't get elected.

º (1645)

The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Szabo. Were you giving testimony or were you posing a question, sir?

You have left the witness with no time. We would welcome your input as a witness anytime. I'll have to get the committee to agree to call you, but I'd be willing to put the question forward, sir.

Mr. Paul Szabo: That was the question that I.... The response of our witness was basically, “Yes, things are pretty good, but do you know what? E-democracy.”

The Chair: But Mr. Szabo, this witness can handle the question.

There is a conflict here. As Mr. Epp pointed out in his questions, this witness is not responsible for what we do in the House. Her responsibilities are specifically for services provided by the government.

Mr. Paul Szabo: Well, sure, for us to do our job, the tools, the IT stuff...?

The Chair: None of it.

It's an interesting question. In fact, we have a committee meeting at eight o'clock on Thursday morning, where we will be discussing this very thing.

Mr. Paul Szabo: Yes, that's what we need, another committee meeting.

Some hon. members: Oh, oh!

Mr. Paul Szabo: Mr. Chair, I guess the question I first posed to the witness was basically why are you here? If you are just here to say that the state of the union and things are looking okay.... When we leave here, I want to think I learned something we can respond to. But if there is nothing to respond to....The witness suggested that the state of the union is good, and then went on to e-democracy. It confused me, and maybe I got drawn into an erroneous conversation.

Mr. Ken Epp: He's badgering the witness.

The Chair: Actually he's badgering the chairman.

I realize the chairman should not enter into debate on these things, but I would again point out that the witness said they succeed in about 25% of projects. I thought that was a fascinating statement worthy of probing, and one we might learn something from. However, we will have to wait until somebody asks that question.

Ms. Michelle d'Auray: There was another one that I suggested, which was how far do you want us to integrate? How much integration is integration?

I used the term e-democracy because I don't have particular or direct responsibility for it, as the chair indicated. I am curious about it. I welcome your response, and I'll stop worrying about it. This is fine.

As for integration and how much we integrate, when we asked citizens and business how much more we could do differently, or how much they wanted us to join services, activities, and information together, it's very difficult for them to respond. They don't have any experience in dealing with us in this way. So how far we integrate is a very difficult question. Do we integrate across jurisdictions, and do we integrate with the private sector, and how do we actually handle the next versions or iterations of electronic service delivery?

º (1650)

The Chair: Mr. Tirabassi.

Mr. Tony Tirabassi (Niagara Centre, Lib.): Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I would also like to welcome Madame d'Auray to the committee to deal with this topic, and to hopefully inform us.

You mentioned in your statement that a key objective of yours is to have the most frequently used services online by 2005. My question is more or less about this gap, or the transition from the large constituency, which is hopefully growing in numbers, which is warming up to and using this because it is comfortable with it. They are doing it willingly because it's more convenient and efficient for them. But you are always going to have another constituency. It might be the elderly, or it might be those people who just don't have access, or who can't afford access to it. Or it might be those who are unwilling, and who will gladly drive their car ten miles to go and pick up a form at a government office, take it home, fill it out, and then drive ten miles back to hand it to somebody.

If all of this is going as well as we hope it's going, which is certainly your goal, the first constituency will grow as it moves down the line through the years, and the other constituency should shrink.

I would like to know your thoughts on the gap in between, which should start to shrink, and on the transition through the digital gap, particularly how you gauge the gap. Can you measure, on the one hand, the person who does things manually and is complying willingly, and all the rest of that, and how much time it's taking them, and the person, on the other hand, who is doing it through e-government? How much time can their...? Can you speak to this, please?

Ms. Michelle d'Auray: In terms of the transition, it is something that we are starting to try to measure or find what I would call useful measurement tools for. So how are people moving online? What are they using the online services for? If they're not using online, why not? And pardon the term, but it's called the client segmentation. So we're starting to now look at it from examining some pretty specific services and understanding how and why people use the telephone for this particular service; why they would prefer to go to an office for another service; why they're quite comfortable moving online, and why some of them will never go online or use the phone and go to.... Knowing those kinds of behaviour is really understanding the behaviour. And we're now starting to use some more sophisticated analysis that allows us then to gauge which services are likely to be taken up a lot faster.

But the bottom line, quite frankly, is that the service over the counter or in person will always be there. The phone service will always be there, and the Internet service will, I would suspect, always be there. It's how it's managed across those three, and can you start.... I think this is really where the complexities will start. If I start something by going to an office, can I complete it on the phone, and can I then go search for more on the web? Because that's really where the use pattern is evolving. For people who will never go on the Internet, there will be always be offices, or there will be mail service, or there will be phone service.

Our goal is to make sure that the people at the counters now can offer a greater wealth of services and information than what we have today, which is, let's say, an office for a specific activity, and then another office for another activity, and then another office for another activity. Can I actually start offering a wealth of riches of service delivery? It's never going to be as rich or as easy as on the web. But can I start providing information and training to people to offer a broader range of service in person? Can I enrich that service line as much as I can enrich the others?

º (1655)

The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Tirabassi. You can come back again. And I think forever is a very long time.

Mr. Epp.

Mr. Ken Epp: Thank you.

I have a few more questions on security. I had the unfortunate occurrence of having my identity stolen and somebody else wanted to look like me. That's incredible, isn't it? But it actually turned out to be fairly serious.

If we're going to be interacting with our citizens for registration, for things like applying for Canada Pension Plan, things like that, are you satisfied that there is going to be adequate security on the individual identity of the person and that you're also going to have some sort of protection against fraudulent use of that?

Ms. Michelle d'Auray: The short answer to your question is yes, and that's what we have built and designed through what we call the secure channel, which allows us to authenticate and to make sure that you are who you say you are online. Where we will require a higher level of security, as is done now for certain services, you can start online, if you will, but we will still ask you to show up in person to validate. So for different types of programs or applications or services where a higher level of identity proofing is required, we will use both online and in person.

Mr. Ken Epp: It's my understanding that people can even now apply for their GST rebates online. Is that not correct?

Ms. Michelle d'Auray: Yes, I believe so.

Mr. Ken Epp: And is that the source of the huge fraud problem we have?

Ms. Michelle d'Auray: No.

Mr. Ken Epp: But the thing is if they're doing that, it would be harder to catch them, wouldn't it?

Ms. Michelle d'Auray: There is information we require that only you would likely know, and then we validate by sending that information to you by mail. And in some instances we will ask you to show up in person if we're not sure that all of our verifications match. So we use a variety of tools or requirements, depending on how much information can be validated and what matches and doesn't match.

Mr. Ken Epp: The next question I have broadens the security question, and it has to do with our national security. I don't know whether there's a conspiracy abroad to try to shut down western governments, but I wouldn't be a bit surprised if somebody in the world is thinking about that. And as we move in our western world towards more and more dependence upon computers, computer databases, files, communication via computers and so on, is there a plan that actually addresses the question of being able to sabotage an entire government by just shutting down their computer systems? It seems to me that there would be a high probability of being able to paralyze the government just by attacking their specific computer installations.

Ms. Michelle d'Auray: I think we've seen the impact, for example, of some viruses that have been propagated recently on the Internet, per se, and on the worldwide network called the Internet. I think most governments, including our own, have business continuity and business resumption plans. We have fairly rigorous information technology security standards and applications. We monitor our systems and our networks constantly.

Our core databases are not web-facing. They're not facing the Internet. They're in fact within quite deep security or perimeter security zones. We take all the precautions we need to. We do as well a fair amount of testing and verification of our systems on a fairly regular basis, especially the core critical systems, especially the data sets.

The Chair: I'm forcing the time a bit now, members, as we're getting down here. I have Mr. Scott, and then Mr. Lanctôt.

Mr. Martin, did you want another question? We have Mr. Martin, and then anybody else if they so indicate. Otherwise, we will move to the chairman's questions. Yes, Mr. Forseth.

Mr. Scott, Mr. Lanctôt.

» (1700)

Hon. Andy Scott (Fredericton, Lib.): Further to Mr. Szabo's intervention, perhaps I would refer to it as e-consultation rather than e-democracy, and that would implicate the government as much as us. I think when the reference is to democracy, we become more implicated.

How do we compare to other jurisdictions in terms of our capacity to engage Canadians in terms of consultation? My concern is a simple one. It's that as we extend our reach in terms of allowing people to pay taxes and other services that we might provide, are we able to also extend our reach in terms of consultation? Because the expectation will be raised that if we can deal with our citizens when we want to deal with them they're going to expect to be able to deal with us when they want to deal with us. And I say this not about us as members of Parliament so much as government.

Consultation has a history. It's generally been quite limited in the context of the numbers of Canadians the government could consult with, and now with technology maybe that limitation is at least minimized. So how are we faring?

Ms. Michelle d'Auray: In terms of what some other countries have done, notably the United Kingdom, not as well. That's not an area, as I mentioned earlier, where we have spent a lot of time and effort. We have focused quite simply on the service, the business process, the transformation, and the focusing on the integration and seeing how many of the services we can start joining together.

Thank you. I think e-consultation is probably a better expression than e-democracy, and I will use that next time. It is an area where we're just beginning to experiment and to see. I think the consultation portal or the integrated consultation site, if you will, that we will be putting up in a couple of months will give us a sense of the potential and the power of that. I think there' s a bit of the attitude of let's build it and they will come, and I don't know that's the case. I think that will also depend on the response time.

I think that something we're also facing on the area of services.... And I'm sorry to go back on services, but that's where we've learned the most. For example, you can file a patent very quickly, like an application for a patent, once the decision is made. The decision is rendered very quickly electronically, but the period in between, the assessment period, hasn't changed. So in a sense you're still dealing with fast in, fast out, but the assessment in the middle hasn't changed.

So it's the same thing, I would argue, with the consultation, in that the more you put out there and the easier it is to reach, how you get back to people will also be a question we don't necessarily have an answer to at the moment. I don't mean by sending an automatic response saying thank you, we received your contribution. It's the process in the middle that I think most governments, most institutions, are dealing with now.

The patent issue is a wonderful one. It still takes you 18 months to get it, but you can sure file it fast, and once the decision is taken, you can get it quickly. But the assessment process is still at 18 months.

The Chair: Thank you.

Mr. Lanctôt.

[Translation]

Mr. Robert Lanctôt: I too am pleased that we are talking about cyberconsultations and not about cyberdemocracy, because there is nothing more human than democracy, so if we are getting further away from what we are, we have a problem.

I will try to be more general this time. If we are talking about cyberconsultations and getting more information from people, obviously this is important to us as a work tool. However, with all the portals we're trying to establish, such as the one Ms. Bennett spoke about at the Sub-Committee on the Status of Persons with Disabilities, and despite the good aspects I see in that, it still makes me very fearful. For example, when we think about all the information involved, including a great deal of personal information, as was demonstrated, I find this quite incredible.

Where are you at and what do you plan to do to protect all this private information? Where are you at in getting access to this information that we could obtain through the Access to Information Act? How far advanced are you? How far have you been able to advance in this regard? In the case of IT projects, it goes without saying that the more information we have, the more we will need to have an effective Access to Information Act and Privacy Act.

» (1705)

Ms. Michelle d'Auray: The Privacy Act is very clear on the information that we are entitled to collect, and particularly on the information that we are not entitled to share. The information we can share between programs and departments is very limited.

What happened in some circumstances—and I think the Privacy Commissioner of Canada mentioned this—such as the Pension Plan and the Guaranteed Income Supplement for seniors—is that we could not or did not think we could share information between the Canada Customs and Revenue Agency and HRDC so as to make these payments automatically. Following discussions with the commissioner, it was possible to exchange the information, and consequently allow individuals to choose whether they wanted to receive directly the payment to which they were entitled.

So there are some situations in which we can start to share information, because individuals receive a net benefit as a result. However, there is also a great deal of work and discussion underway to determine whether we are asking for too much information. That is one of the most important aspects of the policy on the evaluation of the impact on privacy considerations. Often, when programs are established, a great deal of information is requested that is not really needed. Consequently, the implementation of this policy now forces us to ask some fairly pointed questions as to whether or not this information is really necessary, what it will be used for and who will have access to it.

The other thing we're trying to promote is to obtain or offer more and more services in which information gathering is not essential, that is anonymous services. Whether the request is for information or for more specific information about a particular activity, most government services are offered without our having to ask who is making the request and why, except when there is a net benefit involved and the benefit or service must go to the individual. The other exception is where there are some very specific criteria for getting access to a service. That is where we have a range of services, probably about 100 of them, for which personal information is absolutely essential for validation and so as to tell individuals that they are entitled to the service or information in question. However, in most cases, we try to offer services anonymously, because that is how the vast majority of transactions are carried out and information provided.

[English]

The Chair: Next is Mr. Forseth and then Mr. Martin.

Mr. Paul Forseth (New Westminster—Coquitlam—Burnaby, Canadian Alliance): Thank you.

I thought we would again go after an issue I have been talking about, which is local citizens, consumers of service, and the distancing that government online may be doing to them, especially seniors. There is a non-profit seniors bureau in my riding. It runs a storefront operation, which is staffed largely by volunteers. Come tax time that local agency brings in all kinds of retired tax accountants or whatever and sets up large day camps, you might say, to help seniors fill out their income tax returns for a very nominal donation. That's the kind of agency that probably the federal government should donate a high-speed computer to and pay for the line charge. Then allow that local agency to be the bridge to the vanishing horizon of the many consumers who have never touched a computer and never will.

In support of that, I was recently at a town hall meeting where many seniors had come to get information regarding seniors benefits, and I saw the local bureaucrats trying to explain changes and what was available to them. By the number of people who turned up at that meeting in response to just a small ad in the paper, it showed that there is a hunger, because they don't know what they don't know. Technology can certainly provide the opportunity for cross-systems information and to let people know what they don't know and to really provide that access.

But just as in mass transportation in cities or the problem of traffic, it's the final mile, that final transition to the consumer at the end, that is often the difficult one. I'm thinking about seniors across the country. They could really take advantage of all of the wonderful work that has been done if in the final mile there were a program to provide access through these volunteer agencies, which are already providing the service whatever way they can get it.

Currently, people from that volunteer agency come down to my office and try to access information about government services. Then they take the printed copy and go back up the street and talk to their clients who don't have that information. I don't see why the government doesn't just give them a computer and pay for the high-speed-line service. It would save a heck of a lot of the other bureaucratic infrastructure you may be planning to get that extra little mile.

» (1710)

Ms. Michelle d'Auray: I don't have a specific answer for you on that point. The only thing I can point to is that community access sites have been set up across the country where there are computers, and people can use them.

I would expand on another point, though, which is to say that part of it, as you pointed out, is understanding what is available. Not everybody will get or will want to get the information online. We are all aging, and, as you know, there will be a growing demand for services. If we can start freeing up public servants, such as data entry clerks, and actually train them to start providing better information services people-to-people rather than doing old technology-type work, then I think that also frees up resources to be used a lot more effectively in dealing with the people who will not want to deal with us online. I think that's also part of the transition we would like to achieve, to move people away from redundant work to higher-value work for people who need the information and the services.

Mr. Paul Forseth: I'm just talking about that last little bit. Sure we have computers in libraries and increasing access, but it's that in-between informed volunteer who actually helps the client get that access. Those kinds of services are happening on a volunteer, non-profit basis across the country. I just think that's a tremendous issue to look at. Providing the capacity to these people would just break the dam as far as allowing seniors especially to get the services they need.

The Chair: Thank you very much.

Mr. Martin.

Mr. Pat Martin: Thank you, Mr. Chair.

My first question, Madam d'Auray, stems from the fact that I'm also the critic for aboriginal affairs. The Auditor General recently stated that first nations are over-audited and buried with paperwork. In fact, they have to file 168 different forms in hard copy every year, over a three a week, to the four or five funding agencies from which they get money. She recommended that this could probably be done with one report a month, and I argue it could be done even more easily were there some effort to file this information electronically.

On a small reserve of 120 people or so it's a full-time job to keep the paperwork going. There's room for error, their funding gets interrupted, and they get accused of being corrupt or incompetent because they don't file their audits. Is there any dialogue or is there any effort to assist INAC/DIAND in getting e-government online for first nations?

Second, there's the privacy issue that was raised by my colleague. Let's use the guaranteed income supplement as an example. CCRA knows which senior citizens are eligible for the guaranteed income supplement by virtue of their income tax returns, yet they're not allowed to tell HRDC because it would breach that person's privacy to use information about them for some purpose other than taxation. That's the truth.

Yet if a person who is on employment insurance leaves the country while they're collecting EI to go and gamble at a North Dakota casino and comes back the same day, the customs people are obliged to phone HRDC and tell them that the person has violated EI rules. When it's against the interests of the individual, privacy is not an issue, but when a person would benefit from that and it would cost the government money, all of a sudden it's a huge privacy issue. There is such a contrast here.

Can you restate what the privacy rules are about sharing information, especially as it pertains to CCRA? I refer to knowing which seniors are poor enough to be eligible but allowing them not to collect for ten years at a time because HRDC says it would be a breach of the person's privacy to use that information to their benefit.

» (1715)

Ms. Michelle d'Auray: I was using that example with Mr. Lanctôt earlier. In fact, the privacy commissioner, HRDC, and CCRA have agreed that we can share the information.

Mr. Pat Martin: Since when?

Ms. Michelle d'Auray: It's in the privacy commissioner's report.

Mr. Pat Martin: This year?

Ms. Michelle d'Auray: Yes, and work is under way for that to happen, and in fact plans are actually under way to, if I can use the term, even “pre-populate” and simplify the forms for people.

Mr. Pat Martin: What about ratting out some poor guy on EI who leaves the country for an afternoon?

Ms. Michelle d'Auray: The Supreme Court has actually ruled on that.

Mr. Pat Martin: In what way?

Ms. Michelle d'Auray: It granted the government leave to--

The Chair: Pro-rat.

Mr. Pat Martin: So ratting is good.

What about aboriginal affairs? Is there any effort to help these people who are being bogged down by paperwork?

Ms. Michelle d'Auray: I think the department has indicated that it is quite happy and willing to look at simplification of the reporting procedures, including looking at online reporting.

Mr. Pat Martin: And what about the Auditor General's recommendations?

Ms. Michelle d'Auray: I can't speak to all the Auditor General's recommendations.

Mr. Pat Martin: That's okay.

Well, I would leave that with you and, if I could, urge your office to please put that on your list of priorities as government operations that desperately need help.

The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Martin. I would note to you that the privacy commissioner will be before us at 11 o'clock on Monday morning if you wish to ask him a few questions. You might find his answers interesting.

Perhaps I could squeeze in a couple of quick questions here before we rise. You pointed out in your opening remarks, Ms. d'Auray, that these are complex and difficult projects, that everybody is learning in a sense as you do this. Private sector success is not 100% and in fact is probably around the same as public sector success. You used the figure that you succeed about 25% of the time, and in other projects you have some difficulties as you are learning to do this. Can you talk to me a bit about that 75%?

Ms. Michelle d'Auray: There are some basic rules, and I would point you to a couple of reports. There is a service provided called Standish, which monitors on a regular basis performance of projects and which gives us good practices, namely what works and what doesn't. Generally speaking, the rules are such that you should never undertake a project or an initiative that is more than between $5 million and $10 million. There is very little in the information technology world in the public or private sector that is below $10 million in terms of re-engineering and in terms of rebasing systems, even in terms of the size and scope of some of the programs and services. There are some, yes, but generally speaking, when you're launching major programs or initiatives, those costs are.... Essentially what Standish tells us, and they have fairly long experience in monitoring this, is that you're dealing with a risk situation every time you go over $5 million, maybe $10 million. That's kind of the basic rule.

The second one is break it down into bits and pieces. Set up off-ramps. Make sure that as you build or construct your architecture, you have a certain flexibility. Purchase or use as much off the shelf as you can, as opposed to customized. If you can, avoid being an early adopter of a solution. Have it road-tested by somebody else; let them suffer the consequences. But quite often government is not in that position. We are some of the first users, and that means that there are risks attached as well.

Strong project management is a requirement. That's been an area where we have made some improvement, but we can certainly make more, and that's a question of people.

The other element would be senior management attention. As many of you can possibly imagine, getting people to spend a lot of time talking about information systems and information technology is a bit of a challenge. Understanding how you integrate that in your business and how critical it is constitutes an area in which both the private and the public sectors have some work to do.

» (1720)

The Chair: Thank you.

I have one final question, one that has two parts and an example. Mr. Epp, you made a comment about the volume of e-mail that is exchanged on a daily basis. I know that the archivist has made comments about us losing a generation of information because we have not yet sorted out how this kind of interaction gets preserved, but that's a topic for another time, and we will have them before the committee.

Mr. Epp also asked, I thought, an interesting question. You made reference to your studies where you were looking at some of these questions of enterprise-wide architecture. Mr. Epp asked, well, doesn't everybody use Outlook or whatever, and you said no. So even with something that is as basic and is used as much as e-mail, you don't have an enterprise-wide solution for that. You integrate a number of them, I assume. Can you talk a little bit about the question of the value of getting to an enterprise-wide architecture on the tool side?

Then you also said something about the information itself, a standard kind of infrastructure for information itself, how it's used and described and what it is as a commodity that's used in government.

Ms. Michelle d'Auray: On the applications and how common or not we are, for the e-mail systems we are largely on Outlook, but we have a number that are not. We are starting to look at moving to a common e-mail system. I think there is increasingly an appetite for that, because it's easier to manage if you have something that's government-wide. It's a lot easier to have interoperability or exchanges of information.

That's an issue we also face for our financial systems, our payroll and compensation systems, and our information and reporting systems. The opportunity we have, quite frankly, is to make some significant improvements in efficiency and, I would argue, some significant savings on how we operate.

We have done a couple of business cases that show that we could in fact move quite significantly in this area. But that takes an approach, going back perhaps to Mr. Szabo's question, that will depend on how much we're willing to integrate and how department-specific we want to be. That raises a whole bunch of other questions, such as can you really move to a government-wide view, and how much government-wide is manageable?

Those are very difficult to crunch, and they get into the culture of departments, the accountabilities of senior managers, and the ability to manage in something as big as a government-wide system. The government of Canada is a very large enterprise, so it does beg the question of, in some instances, can you go government-wide?

The Chair: On the information...?

Ms. Michelle d'Auray: On information management, we are doing some fairly interesting work right now. It started almost as basic as tagging specific information so we knew who originated it, where it could be found, and how it could be categorized. Next was understanding how it could be used or re-used across the government and how we could start to develop an information architecture across an organization like the Government of Canada.

We are doing some of this work right now with the science-based departments because there is a fair amount of information in geographical information systems or services, for example, where we take information from a variety of sources but it is not consistently tagged or organized. It is an opportunity in terms of services, but also for business people to be able to use it.

So we are spending a fair amount of time and effort right now constructing that information architecture. It's pretty complex, because you're basically telling people how to categorize their information, that they have to tag and code it as they produce it. But the benefits over time are fairly significant.

» (1725)

The Chair: On the discussion about the value of a unique identifier for people, Mr. Martin used the example of how you identify the same individual in two areas. Is there work under way or has there been discussion about the creation of a form of unique identifier to facilitate ease of service to citizens?

Ms. Michelle d'Auray: The short answer is not really, because the discussions we have are mainly based on the existing legal framework, in which we do not have a unique identifier or share information.

Our architecture right now, on both a technology side and an information side, is geared to letting the individual control the information, how much information is transmitted, and to whom it is transmitted. Where the sharing or re-use of information is permissible--and there's a very small number of departments, programs, or services where that's possible--we explore that and talk to the privacy commissioner about it.

Generally speaking, we have not explored the movement to a unique identifier. We have explored what we call an electronic pass. If you'll pardon the expression, it's a meaningless but unique number, otherwise known as an MBUN. It has nothing embedded in it except a scrambled piece of a number. It's a digital certificate that essentially says we have recognized you somewhere, we know who you are.

When the digital certificate comes knocking on another electronic service, it just recognizes that the number has been identified, that the certificate has been validated by somebody else, but there's nothing embedded in it. All the data still rests in the department that has access to the data. It isn't shared or re-used. So we have built our infrastructure not to create a unique identifier.

The Chair: Working within the existing legal framework.

Ms. Michelle d'Auray: Absolutely.

The Chair: We are out of time. I want to thank you very much for a very interesting discussion, on very short notice. I trust we will see you here many times. I know you look forward to that with excitement.

We are adjourned and will resume at eleven o'clock Monday morning.