Federal auditor general Karen Hogan holds a news conference after delivering five performance audit reports to the House of Commons, at the National Press Theatre in Ottawa, on Oct. 19.Justin Tang/The Canadian Press
Auditor-General Karen Hogan peeked under the hood of the government’s computer systems, and last week she found some of the biggest and most important are falling apart, and might one day crash.
On Tuesday, a Commons committee will hold hearings about smaller systems contracted out through several layers of consultants who added commissions as the bills piled up. The RCMP has been called.
These two things are different, but part of the same long-running issue. Managing IT projects seems to be beyond the capacity of the machinery of government in Ottawa.
It’s time to recognize the government of Canada has a massive computer problem. It has a lot of trouble with zeros and ones.
That problem has been given lip service. For a while, there was a minister of digital government, and since July there is a Minister of Citizens’ Services, Terry Beech, whose task is focused on the government’s customer-service agency, Service Canada. But there isn’t an overarching plan to fix the government’s weak capacity for IT projects. Politicians don’t win votes for that.
Yet tens of billions of dollars are involved. Some systems are critical for managing information or delivering benefits. When officials can’t manage IT projects, the door is opened to waste and abuse.
Those things come back to politicians when projects blow up in failure or cost overruns, like the civil service’s Phoenix pay system, or if you go back further, the long-gun registry.
And then in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, a simple app for people crossing the border into Canada, ArriveCan, tallied up at least $54-million in costs.
About $9-million of that was contracted out to GCStrategies, a firm with two employees, Kristian Firth and Darren Anthony, who subcontracted other workers, often paid $1,000 to $1,500 a day, but charged a commission of 15 per cent to 30 per cent.
Mr. Firth said last year his company had $44-million in federal contract work over two years. Sometimes the subcontractors were big firms such as BDO and KPMG – a practice Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called “illogical and inefficient.” No kidding.
Three weeks ago, The Globe and Mail reported the allegations of two partners in a company called Botler, Ritika Dutt and Amir Morv, who said they were encouraged by a government official, Cameron MacDonald, to work through GCStrategies. They were surprised to learn later their work was billed through a third firm they had never heard of. The Canada Border Services Agency has referred Botler’s allegations to the RCMP; a Commons committee will hold hearings on the matter this week.
It’s not clear what those inquiries will reveal, but it is pretty clear that there wasn’t a crackerjack system for overseeing the projects. And that’s been a connecting thread to other IT mishaps.
Ottawa has had plenty of warnings that it needs more senior officials with tech expertise to oversee contractors properly. Carleton University professor Amanda Clarke put it this way back in January: “You need to have a core capacity in-house in order that you can be a smart shopper.”
The federal bureaucracy hasn’t really been rewired for that. The Phoenix pay system, started under Stephen Harper’s Conservatives and completed under Mr. Trudeau’s Liberals, was driven by officials prioritizing schedule and budget but not whether it actually worked, then-auditor-general Michael Ferguson reported in 2018.
That’s in the past. Except there is still an IT time bomb Ottawa has been sitting on.
Many federal systems are old, some dating to the 1960s, Ms. Hogan’s auditors found. And 38 per cent of applications deemed “mission critical” are rated in poor health. Some applications are so antiquated that government departments must use outdated computer hardware to run them.
These types of warning aren’t exactly new. A previous auditor-general said similar things in 2010. There is still no overall strategy to deal with it. Progress is slow.
Why worry about that? Unless, of course, it’s the 21st century and computer systems are used for important things.
In 2010, the government acknowledged that its old system for employment insurance benefits was at high risk of failure. In 2023, Ms. Hogan found it hadn’t been modernized. There is a plan to update it, but in 2028 “at the earliest.” It’s time the government recognizes it has to tackle its computer problem.