On Friday, March 13, as Parliament suspended and MPs booked their tickets out of Ottawa, Paul Glover thought, Next week’s going to be a very different week. 

The World Health Organization had declared COVID-19 a global pandemic just two days earlier, leaving Glover and the federal government’s IT agency he heads the Herculean task of helping departments transition tens of thousands of public servants to work from their kitchen tables and children’s desks.

The following Monday, Canada’s largest employer made it official, instructing staff to telecommute “wherever and whenever possible.” 

In the midst of arguably the biggest crisis since the Second World War, the apparatus of the federal government was going remote. As president of Shared Services Canada, it was Glover’s job to ensure that the public service kept running, able to literally answer the calls of millions of Canadians who needed government assistance, fast. “We started to get into exceptionally high gear at that point,” recalled Glover in an interview with The Logic. 

The COVID-19 buildout shows the new plan for Shared Services appears to be working. But not all public servants are back on the job yet, and the agency is still working to assuage longstanding concerns about internal morale and service levels.

Shared Services started preparing for a mass-telework event “quite a bit before” the work-from-home edict was handed down by the Treasury Board Secretariat (TBS), Glover said. Public servants had trouble connecting to the network during February snowstorms in each of the last two years, a government source told The Logic earlier this year. Following those weather-related emergencies, Shared Services asked departments to review their access needs—in response to which the agency typically sets capacity—and stress-tested the network in the first week of March, Glover said. 

Since the lockdown began, Ottawa’s IT agency has spent $60 million on new hardware, additional licences and other technology to more than double secure remote access capacity. 

“That’s tablets and equipment to help people work at home, network upgrades, secure remote access points, specialized equipment and hardware to deal with the volumes of Canadians trying to access new benefits, and increased storage costs and computing costs to deal with those unprecedented volumes,” Glover told a parliamentary committee in late May. “It’s everything end to end.”

The agency initially prioritized divisions spearheading the COVID-19 response, such as Health Canada, the Public Health Agency of Canada, the Prime Minister’s Office and its public service counterpart, the Privy Council Office, Glover said. Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC), which processed the initial flood of unemployment claims, and the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA), which administers the Canada Emergency Response Benefit, came next. 

The tax department and the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) now each have capacity for 60,000 concurrent connections, followed by Defence (40,000) and ESDC (23,000). “Every weekend, we had teams working to perform upgrades across the system, and most evenings we had teams working to turn on the upgrades,” Glover said.

To enable the expansion, Shared Services bought extra bandwidth from network providers Rogers and Telus, and extra software licences for the secure gateways that allow remote access. It accelerated the launch of Microsoft Teams, a chat and collaboration tool, and web-based Office 365. The agency had already acquired an enterprise licence for the products, but had “literally a three-year plan” to introduce them, said Glover. Instead, it rolled them out in six weeks.

It also expanded email storage limits, and asked wireless carrier Bell to enable Wi-Fi calling on government-issued smartphones to deal with spotty service. 

While several departments told most staff to stay off the virtual private network at the start of the pandemic, Shared Services said it can now handle 290,000 simultaneous connections, with 185,000 in use on average. That’s up from the typical 40,000 pre-pandemic.

“As it stands now, a lot of people have full access,” said Debi Daviau, president of the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada, a union representing more than 60,000 federal workers, including many IT staff. “I’ve had some complaints from members about slowness [and] inconsistency on the system still, but I think that’s also improving over time.” She had earlier raised concerns about technology infrastructure for remote work.

Still, not all of the public service’s quarter-million-plus members have been able to do their jobs during the pandemic. More than a quarter of the workforce took paid time off at some point during the first 11 weeks. Some groups within departments that weren’t deemed critical early on, such as several teams that process access-to-information requests with whom The Logic frequently communicates, are only just restoring limited operations.   

Daviau hopes the pandemic build out will encourage the government to offer staff more flexibility about where they do their jobs. “Longer term, it wouldn’t make sense that you make all this investment in enabling people to work remotely, and then don’t capitalize,” she said. 

In May, Transport Canada deputy minister Michael Keenan told an employee town hall the department’s “default will be telework,” later clarifying that’s true for the “foreseeable future.” The following month, Treasury Board president Jean-Yves Duclos said more public servants will continue to regularly work remotely than before the pandemic. 

The TBS guidebook on easing COVID-19 restrictions, however, signals that Ottawa doesn’t plan to maintain all its new technology infrastructure, instructing departments to restore networks and licences to pre-pandemic levels. 

Shared Services is in discussions with departments about how much capacity they want to maintain, according to Glover. “We don’t want to turn things off too soon, but we also want to be prudent with taxpayers’ money and not keep things turned on unnecessarily,” he said, adding that the agency wants to ensure it’s ready “if there’s future waves and we find we have to go back.”

The agency received an extra $5.5 million in the federal government’s June estimates, less than a tenth of its COVID-19 spending. That hasn’t put a hole in its $2-billion budget, however. While the pandemic “definitely impacted properties,” regular work has now mostly resumed, Glover said. Shared Services’ consolidation of old data centres, for example, remains on schedule. Tasks that require building access, such as installing Wi-Fi, have been paused.  

Employee engagement at the agency, which consolidated departmental IP operations in 2011, has historically trailed the wider federal workforce, although the gap has narrowed. Client departments like Statistics Canada and the CBSA have also raised concerns about poor support, and posters on a public servants’ Reddit forum have frequently cited the slow pace of fulfilling equipment requests. 

Glover attributes the morale and service issues to the challenges of merging dozens of groups into a single new organization. Improving the network and launching new collaboration tools are key parts of his plan for the agency, which has done both during the pandemic. 

As he reflects on the last five months, Glover is grateful that his team could help provide the technology infrastructure to allow the CRA to deliver financial assistance to millions of Canadians. Those pandemic projects have created “a renewed sense of pride,” he said, and prompted “a lot of shoutouts from departments.”