SOME SOBER READING. COYNE,
This year’s auditor general’s report made for unusually sombre reading.
Auditor general’s reports are never exactly lighthearted romps, concerned as they are with the many ways governments find to make a pile of the money they have taken from us and burn it.
But the theme of this year’s edition was not merely the undiminished bedlam in the public sector but, it seemed, the sheer futility of any attempts to fix it, or even monitor it. To be perfectly frank, I am a little concerned about the AG, and hope someone is checking in on him.
Every year, Michael Ferguson writes, disconsolately, “we see government programs that are not designed to help those who have to navigate them, programs where the focus is more on what civil servants are doing than on what citizens are getting, where delivery times are long, where data is incomplete, and where public reporting does not provide a clear picture of what departments have done.”
Worse, though “our audits come across these same problems in different organizations time and time again …. when we come back to audit the same area again, we often find that program results have not improved.”
That was nearly three weeks ago. It was before we learned the full extent of the fiasco known as the Phoenix payroll system, a state-ofthe-art computerized marvel with which the government has underpaid tens of thousands of its employees, overpaid thousands more, and paid nothing at all to the rest for months at a time, all at an estimated extra cost of $50 million — not counting the performance bonuses paid out to the public service managers responsible.
It was before the latest report from Shared Services Canada, responsible for all of the federal government’s computer operations, which now hopes to have installed a new unified email system across all government departments by March 2018 that was supposed to have been finished by March 2015.
That, however, is nothing compared to the mushroom cloud of disaster enveloping a similar attempt to bring all of the federal government’s 1,500 websites onto a common platform. Originally budgeted at $1.5 million, it was to have been completed by year-end. With just 0.05 per cent of the estimated 17 million pages of federal content online having been ported over to the new site, it is now aiming at a December 2017 deadline — naturally, at 10 times the original cost.
Sorry, did I say 10 times? That’s just the money to be paid to the contractor. The internal costs are now projected to run to the hundreds of millions of dollars, possibly even $1 billion. Needless to say the new deadline is widely regarded as a fantasy.
When it comes to information technology, in other words, the record of federal ineptitude may yet rival the serial catastrophes inflicted upon the public in the name of military procurement.
Things are not perhaps quite as far gone as in Ontario, whose own auditor general recently unearthed, among other amusements, the payment of $19 million to a contractor for building a bridge upside down. But it suggests, shall we say, a certain skepticism with respect to government’s ability to take on large, technically demanding assignments.
I say this for the benefit of the members of the Commons Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates, which has just delivered a report into a singularly troublesome government operation, Canada Post.
That would be the Canada Post that, though in possession of a statutory monopoly on first-class mail, still manages to lose millions of dollars a year — with ever deepening losses projected in the years to come. ($700 million annually, according to a study by Ernst & Young, by 2026.)
That would be the Canada Post that has increased the price of a stamp by 688 per cent since 1981, in return for which it delivers on fewer days of the week to fewer addresses on a slower schedule: two days across town is now considered “on time,” where before it was considered a day late.
You would think the post office’s decades-long record of inability to do the one job it is asked to do — deliver the mail with some regularity — would occasion some rethinking of its mandate, perhaps to allow competition in mail delivery, as other countries have done, rather than continue to enforce a monopoly on a service that, over much of the country, it refuses to provide.
Instead, the committee’s Liberal majority proposes, not only that the post office should continue to do everything it does now, only at greater public expense, but that it should expand its mandate to the very frontiers of the known technological world, circa 1993. Excited by the untold possibilities of a network of computers some are calling “the Information Superhighway,” the committee suggests Canada Post might stem its losses on conventional mail by venturing into a service known as “email.”
I am not making this up. “Canadians need access to made and hosted in Canada free digital infrastructure to facilitate trusted communications between themselves and government and with each other,” the report claims. “Canada Post could play a pivotal role in providing the basis for a Canadian social network — authentication service, email and block chain authority for the benefit of Canadians.”
The committee majority’s apparent belief that there is an untapped market for email or a shortage of social networks would be bizarre enough. But who in their right mind would propose that Canada Post should be the one to fill it? This isn’t just “the triumph of hope over experience.” It is evidence of severe cognitive dysfunction.
As therapy, I prescribe a read of the last five auditor general’s reports.