General items: Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates—June 10, 2022

Document navigation for "Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates: June 10, 2022"

Opening statement

By: The Honourable Filomena Tassi
Minister of Public Services and Procurement Canada and minister responsible for Shared Services Canada

Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates
Supplementary Estimates A

June 10, 2022

(Word count, 627)

Good afternoon, Mr. Chair, committee members, thank you for inviting me to appear before you again today.

Let me begin by acknowledging that I am joining virtually from Hamilton, which is located on the traditional territory of the Haudenosaunee [hoe dee na SHOW nee] and the Anishinaabe [a-nish-nah-bay] peoples.

With me are:

With me from Public Services and Procurement Canada are my deputy minister Paul Thompson and the Chief Financial Officer, Wojciech Zielonka.

I am pleased to be here as minister responsible for Shared Services Canada to discuss the organization’s Supplementary Estimates A.

Shared Services Canada, or SSC, is responsible for equipping public servants with the secure and reliable information technology infrastructure they need to support government operations.

The work done at SSC also ensures that we can deliver digital programs and services to Canadians that are secure, reliable and easy to use, from anywhere.

To support digital government, we need a high-performing and resilient enterprise network. That means moving away from individual departmental networks to modern government-wide networks.

Mr. Chair, Shared Services Canada is responsible for managing the security and network infrastructure for its partner departments and clients.

SSC is also responsible for securing the network perimeter and managing the government’s secret infrastructure. That’s 50 networks enabling digital communications for about 400,000 users, nationally and internationally.

SSC operates 336 data centers including 4 enterprise data centres that provide secure, reliable hosting services for Government of Canada applications and data.

To ensure the safety and security of Canadians’ data and the services provided by the Government of Canada, the information technology infrastructure must be safe from vulnerabilities and able to swiftly and effectively respond to cyber security attacks.

We take cyber security very seriously. Cyber security is a shared responsibility between Shared Services Canada, the Communications Security Establishment (CSE) and the Treasury Board Secretariat. Shared Services Canada is an integral part of the cyber security tripartite.

On any given day, the defensive cyber systems of the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security, a division of the CSE, can block anywhere from 3 to as many as 7 billion actions targeting Government of Canada networks.

When it comes to government information technology (IT) solutions the government is looking for greater flexibility, mobility and efficiency. That means developing networks that are accessible anytime, anywhere by anyone on a trusted and secure platform.

With this in mind, SSC is providing the key building blocks for the adoption of cloud computing.

Moving government services and operations to cloud-based services and cross government data centres will reduce the risk of major IT failure as well as ensuring safe and efficient services.

The improved efficiencies will save taxpayers money as well as reduce the Government of Canada’s carbon footprint.

When it comes to directing the traffic on the network itself, SSC is looking to use software-defined networking technology as well as artificial intelligence to get better network performance and monitoring.

To support these key network modernization activities, SSC is requesting through Supplementary Estimates A, an increase to reference levels by $86 million, to a total of $2.7 billion.

SSC will invest this additional funding in information technology services so that the Government of Canada can leverage new technologies and approaches to security for continued support to existing as well as new government programs and services for Canadians.

Thank you again for the invitation to join you today virtually, and I am pleased to answer questions related to the Supplementary Estimates A for Shared Services Canada.

Thank you.

Document navigation for "Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates: June 10, 2022"

Date modified: