OTTAWA — Elections Canada is creating virtual offices for its electoral officials and overhauling its antiquated data repositories—but carefully, in bite-sized pieces, conscious of debacles like the federal government’s Phoenix pay system.

“We know that voter expectations are very high,” deputy chief electoral officer Serge Caron told The Logic in an interview. “When an election is called, all the electors expect and rightfully expect a secure, available voting experience.”

A general election is not just one intense day of voting and counting. A campaign is ordinarily five to six weeks. The returning officers for each riding find and prepare the polling places (for advance and regular voting), recruit the poll workers who staff them, answer questions from candidates and voters practically from Day 1.

“We need to deploy immediately as the election is called. Over 500 offices. Imagine if you were opening 500 stores across Canada in a matter of days from coast to coast to coast,” Caron said. “We need to be open for business in a matter of days.”

This has typically been hampered by the realities of logistics.

Elections Canada has “monotainers” of equipment that fly out the door to local offices almost immediately, but there’s still a delay setting up those 500 offices with 4,000 phones, 6,000 computers and 50,000 “pieces of IT gear,” Caron said.

“We need to do it in all kinds of weather conditions as well. We’ve had snowstorms, we’ve had hurricanes, we’ve had forest fires,” he said. “And we had the big pandemic for the last general election. I don’t recall the number of hand-sanitizer bottles that we had.”

The pandemic was the spur for virtualizing riding-level operations, he said. The idea is to set up offices that work in the cloud most of the time but can be plunked into physical locations once those are ready after an election call. “We’re leveraging all these tools and productivity suites at headquarters. And that really changed the way we work. We want to make sure that we increase the ring of that,” Caron said.

Moving riding-level operations into the cloud is an 18-month, $1.5-million effort, according to preliminary figures in documents obtained by The Logic through access to information requests. And relatively speaking, it’s the easy thing, happening alongside an effort to modernize Elections Canada’s voter rolls and record-keeping.

“At Elections Canada, we have a data structure that is hindering our ability to use the data efficiently to foster a data-driven workforce,” a briefing note describing the larger effort says. “Throughout the years, we have created processes that have duplicated our data, creating many databases and systems. This duplication and inherent complexity require heroic efforts from subject-matter experts … to generate required reports and data extracts.”

Consider how Elections Canada tracks who has voted on an election day.

“You know the experience when you go into a polling location. You have that stack of paper, you have the ruler and you have, like—” Caron mimed inking a straight line across a list of names “—zip!”

Paper ballots aren’t going anywhere, he stressed: Elections Canada thinks the physical, auditable evidence of voters’ preferences is critical. But tracking who has voted by scanning a QR code on a phone or slip of paper would be a lot faster and more secure than paper lists spread across thousands of polling places, marked by hand.

Keeping voter lists in the cloud could enable voters to cast ballots anywhere in their constituencies (close to work, perhaps, instead of close to home) because all the polling places would work from the same online list.

Creating a new data structure for addresses is the first of many steps toward making that reality, this one budgeted at $3.7 million.

Even during a relatively long-lived majority government, there are byelections—between the general elections of 2015 and 2019, there were byelections in 18 ridings after MPs quit for other gigs, retired or died—and the possibility of snap election calls. In minority parliaments, which have been five of the last seven, there can be no real breathers.

This constant state of high readiness gives Elections Canada reason to prefer incremental change over total replacements. Alex Benay, who was then the federal government’s chief information officer, advocated for agile, iterative procurement in government IT. Elections Canada seems to be running with the idea.

“We’re progressing through a life cycle and we want to have small increments being deployed because we know that we don’t want big monolithic projects that are more difficult to manage,” Caron said.

Everyone in the government knows about the Phoenix pay system, which was meant to consolidate a cobwebby mess of smaller systems into one really good one. It never worked right, and six years after it went live, the feds are still contending with a backlog of over 100,000 transactions while they procure a replacement.

Bad as that case is, a technology screwup that undermines faith in Canadian democracy would be worse.

“The key fundamental principle is that we want to deliver business value packages regularly, because this is a change,” he said. “If you wait for a long period of time, from a change-management point of view, it’s very difficult to sell [and] to live, and the environment changes all the time.”