We all suspected this was coming, but
perhaps not in this particular form. Tony Clement and Rona Ambrose held a press
conference yesterday to announce that they were creating Shared Services
Canada, which is designed to do things like work on unifying the government’s
diverse and numerous IT systems (like they announced two years ago), all in the
name of cost savings. So far so good, right?
Well, maybe not. You see, there are a whole
lot of unanswered questions in this whole endeavour, and it may not really
deliver much in the way of savings, if any. First of all, they insisted that
Shared Service Canada is not a new bureaucracy, but just pieces of other ones
redirected. Only they gave it its own Deputy Minister to run it (which you
can’t exactly redirect from elsewhere, and costs money). There is zero mention of the kind of
money involved in doing the work. You know, not only the work of unifying
systems, but of the work it’ll take to start migrating unique legacy systems to
new platforms (like what the Auditor General talked about a couple of years
ago, and said that it would cost $2 billion for just five major entities). They
claim that reducing the number of systems and data centres is “more secure,”
but consider this – the Finance Department and Treasury Board got hacked in a major
way this year, but it was contained to those two departments. If we move them
all together, wouldn’t that make hacks or other damage (fire, flood,
earthquake, ice storm) to data centres have a much greater impact? They cite
Ontario as saving money by moving to a single data centre – except the part
where the per capita costs were right back to where they started a couple of
years later (page seven of this report), as well as the fact that the
procurement process becomes pretty much impossible for small and medium-sized
businesses to get any contracts. What about the fact that the government was subjected to a
lawsuit a few years ago by WordPerfect because they tailored their procurement contract
for Microsoft? Then there is the testimony they gave at the Senate when they passed the legislation that enabled
this, where they said that none of this would be mandatory for departments, and
that they weren’t looking at job cuts (except that they are now). All of this
to say, it’s not like we couldn’t use some better efficiency with government IT
practices, but it would be nice if the government could be upfront about a few
things, and not look like they are complete IT neophytes as they come up with
this major undertaking that likely won’t save them any money in the end. (And
once again, a huge debt to @P41Questions for his work over the Twitter Machine
with some of the background material).
It seems that Nycole Turmel laid a lot of
the groundwork for the NDP’s Sherbrooke Declaration (their policy on Quebec),
which is all about asymmetrical federalism and abrogating the Clarity Act.
John Baird met with Hillary Clinton in
Washington, who appreciated his “candour.”
Seeing as the government seems to be
committed to washing its hands of our nuclear industry, here is a look at some
of the private interests who are now vying to take over Chalk River and our
research reactor there.
The second quarter results are in, and the
NDP, the Liberals and the Conservatives are all doing well for fundraising.
Yes, even the Liberals, whom the pundit class keeps asserting are “broke” (even
though they are far from).
And Laureen Harper was onstage with the
Backstreet Boys last night being serenaded. Because the Harpers have really
decided to get all the mileage they can out of this gig of theirs, apparently,
even though meeting celebrities wasn’t Harper’s shtick.
