OTTAWA — The computer system that delivers Canada’s old age security benefits is nearly old enough to claim benefits itself, a 60-year-old relic that the federal government has once already tried and failed to replace.

A relatively recent update allows people to apply for the benefit online, but it’s a façade, said Cliff Groen, the senior federal public servant who’s been in charge, since last summer, of not screwing it up a second time.

That’s because a human is hiding in the computer cabinet.

“The information gets entered by the client, if they’re applying online, but then our agents have to take that information and enter it into the system,” Groen said. 

The old age security program (known as OAS) is to be the first of three big federal benefits to get a system overhaul by Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC), where Groen is a senior assistant deputy minister. After OAS come the Canada Pension Plan and employment insurance. Collectively, they make this the most important information-technology project in the history of Canada, and possibly the largest.

The three programs dispensed $136 billion in payments in 2019–20. The total package of upgrades, called “benefits delivery modernization,” is estimated to cost $2.2 billion and to take more than 10 years.

If anything goes awry and critical support payments don’t go out, it will make Phoenix, the pay system for federal public servants launched disastrously in 2016, a footnote in the history of government IT catastrophes.

Things have not gone flawlessly so far.

“This project has experienced repeated delays,” read a memo prepared for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, dated May 27, 2022, to bring him up to speed on major digital projects in the federal government. Three, including a replacement for Phoenix, were progressing acceptably in their early phases. The benefits overhaul was the fourth.

Signed by Janice Charette, the clerk of the Privy Council—the very top federal public servant—the document warned that the benefits project had missed many milestones and had failed to spend money budgeted for it.

Officials in multiple oversight roles “have raised concerns about ESDC’s capacity to deliver under the set timelines and budget,” Charette’s memo said.

“In addition,” Charette wrote about federal computer systems generally, “institutional knowledge about custom system design, function and interdependencies have not been captured and communicated over time, meaning the [government of Canada] is critically low in the expertise needed for legacy IT maintenance and replacement.”

“It’s generally Cobol-based screens. It’s very manual,” Groen said about OAS in particular. “There’s one OAS legacy system, but there are interfaces with lots of other systems as well. You need to shift from different screen to different screen. It’s not very intuitive.”

Cobol, a programming language devised for mainframes in 1959, was already an occult tongue when institutions with older computers panicked about the Y2K bug in the late 1990s. Canada wasn’t alone in running into a Cobol wall when the pandemic hit older social-welfare computer systems in 2020.

Pensions and unemployment benefits are among many federal services delivered with computer systems held together by masking tape and chanting, in other words, and we’ve forgotten some of the spells.

The previous attempt to update the OAS system would have seen it integrated into the Canada Pension Plan system, which is more youthful but still old enough to vote. Efforts to migrate millions of data points about OAS recipients and their payment histories ended in failure, Groen said, because the pension system couldn’t handle it.

The obsolescence of these critical systems became a crisis when the economy crashed into COVID-19 in early 2020. Government officials realized the employment-insurance system— more than 40 years old—would be utterly unable to handle the expected tsunami of claims.

The result was the Canada Emergency Response Benefit, the CERB, which bypassed the mess because it was delivered largely through the more modern income-tax system.

Charette’s memo last May told the prime minister that with benefits-delivery modernization in disarray, there was “an upcoming decision regarding leadership for this project.”

That decision was to turn to the person the government put in charge of delivering the CERB in the panicky days of 2020: Cliff Groen. He’s working alongside a “technical lead,” John Ostrander, who brings the information-technology chops.

Before the CERB assignment, Groen had had increasingly senior jobs at Service Canada starting in 2006. “I have really extensive experience and knowledge of these programs, probably more than anyone at the senior level,” Groen said.

Is this a strength? Depends whom you ask. Michele Lajeunesse, the senior vice-president of government relations and policy for tech lobby group Technation, argues that there’s no reason why people who are deeply familiar with particular programs would be the best people to replace the computers that run them.

“If ESDC is mandated to deliver the service, then they are the subject-matter expert,” she told The Logic. “They’re not necessarily the expert at managing that project, nor should they be.”

ESDC’s programs are big, Lajeunesse acknowledged, but the Canadian government is not the first to overhaul the way it delivers large social benefits.

She pointed out that the Ukrainian government has rapidly expanded an app for its citizens to access documents and services since the Russian invasion in February 2022. At the end of 2021, it included 15 digital documents and 12 services.

The additions have included tools for reporting the destruction of your home and seeking government support as a result, and for finding internally displaced people. A chatbot takes information on the movements of Russian forces. 

“It was all outsourced,” Lajeunesse said. “It was all done by industry, in concert with the subject-matter experts who know how they need the service to be delivered to Ukrainian citizens.”

The Canadian government’s plans include plenty of outsourcing.

Last August, ESDC announced it had hired Deloitte (a Technation member) to handle the “onboarding” of the old age security system. This contract alone is worth nearly $194 million.

It is a monster, by IT-world standards. “I heard it out of one of our members that if you were a commercial company, in most cases you would not undertake a project more than $10 million at a time, simply because of the risk for both sides,” Lajeunesse said. But then, OAS is a monster program, delivering more than $60 billion a year to seven million people.

The modernized benefits system is being built on a private-sector platform called Curam. It’s formerly an IBM product, but was part of IBM’s spinout of health-related offerings in 2022. Now Curam belongs to Merative, which is owned by U.S. private-equity firm Francisco Partners.

IBM worked on Phoenix, as well, albeit as contractors customizing software that came from Oracle.

Groen knows about Phoenix.

“The root issues and causes of the Phoenix problems are very complex and I don’t think it’d be fair and appropriate to lay that at the feet of just the technology solution,” he said.

Anyway, Curam is unrelated to the PeopleSoft software underlying Phoenix, he said. Curam is working successfully in 19 other jurisdictions, and the government has learned from the project-management failures that led to the Phoenix catastrophe, Groen said.

Curam is, however, the software the Ontario government chose for an overhaul of its social-benefits programs in the early 2010s, which also went badly. The provincial politician holding that bag was community-services minister Helena Jaczek, who is now a federal Liberal MP and the minister of public services and procurement. Her press secretary Olivier Pilon said Jaczek was too busy to talk about any lessons she learned from that experience.

The key lessons from Phoenix, said Groen, are the need for clear and narrow accountability paired with high-level involvement from other affected departments, and moving forward in small steps.

Within the bureaucracy, “ultimate accountability for the program rests with me,” Groen said. (Karina Gould, the minister responsible for Service Canada, is the elected official responsible.) Other departments are closely involved, but deciding whether to push the button or wait will not be a group decision—it’ll be his.

Unlike with Phoenix, there will be no “big bang,” when the old system is turned off and everybody starts using the new one, Groen said. Not even for the first tranche of work, the old age security system.

Compared to Canada pensions and EI, OAS is a simple benefits program. In general, you get it when you reach age 65, and then you get monthly payments for the rest of your life.

But even OAS is being sliced into thin pieces for the changeover. In June, Groen said, they’re going to start by using the new system to process applications from people who get OAS-like benefits from certain other countries, with which Canada has agreements to coordinate coverage.

If that slice works, then in spring 2024, Service Canada will start testing the new system for all OAS applications.

“Essentially we’ll be taking a swivel-chair approach, in which clients’ applications will be received, and then our agents will process those applications both in the new system, but also in the old system,” Groen said. If that works, the real changeover will happen in December 2024.

The old OAS system, Cobol hocus-pocus and all, will remain as a backup.

“We are not going to be turning it off until the entire program is successfully delivered and proven and it operates,” Groen said. “We have rollback plans if—hopefully they would never be needed. But if we needed to, we’d be able to roll back onto the existing system.”

The latest federal budget appears to give Groen’s efforts a vote of confidence, boosting ESDC’s funding by $123.9 million over seven years to finish the job with OAS, before taking on the Canada Pension Plan and EI after that.

The systems work adequately now but they’re fragile and will only get worse without action, Groen said.

“We can’t accept any risk of failure in the delivery of these programs to Canadians.”