\n ‘There is a risk of this type of event becoming ever more frequent …’<\/span> The Canada Revenue Agency site was taken down for the same reason, just as tax-filing season began.<\/p>\n At a March 13 news conference<\/a>, a government official said the problems had been resolved after three days.<\/p>\n “We are pleased to note that any affected websites have been patched and have been returned to normal operations,” said Jennifer Dawson, of the Treasury Board Secretariat. Officials said at least one hacker got into the Statistics Canada site, but did no damage, and confidential CRA data was never compromised.<\/p>\n The CRA website appeared to operate without further problems after the fix.<\/p>\n But the released emails show the Statistics Canada website remained dysfunctional for weeks as a series of new problems were revealed.<\/p>\n “We received the results this morning and there are still some vulnerabilities so the focus will be to fix them and re-scan them today,” says one March 27 update.<\/p>\n Shared Services Canada, the troubled IT agency now responsible for maintaining Statistics Canada’s website, confirmed to CBC News that there were “intermittent outages” until April 4\u00a0\u2014 or 26 days after the problems were first identified.<\/p>\n The emails also suggest Statistics Canada was sometimes not in the loop as Shared Services Canada worked to restore the public-facing website, which is virtually the only means for widely disseminating data to Canadians.<\/p>\n The decision to take down the website was made by Shared Services Canada, rather than by chief statistician\u00a0Anil Anora or other senior Statistics Canada officials.<\/p>\n Internal emails suggest that a problem with Statistics Canada’s website was not reported to the current chief statistician, Anil Anora, until the day after Shared Services Canada decided to take down the site.<\/p>\n Anora and the other officials only learned it had come down the morning after,\u00a0shortly before the Labour Force Survey\u00a0\u2014 a key monthly jobs report\u00a0\u2014 was scheduled to be posted online, emails show.<\/p>\n Wayne Smith, the former chief statistician who resigned in protest last September<\/a> citing Statistics Canada’s eroding independence, says the incident shows the agency is still beholden to an ineffective IT provider.<\/p>\n “This was the longest outage of Statistics Canada’s website since it began operation,” Smith said after reviewing the released emails. “There is a risk of this type of event becoming ever more frequent, resulting in a serious degradation of service.”<\/p>\n And despite the Liberal government’s efforts to fix Shared Services Canada, the IT agency remains a problem for other government departments as well, he said.<\/p>\n “Still the same crowd, steering the bureaucratic boat that brought us the failed email system<\/a>, Phoenix<\/a>, the outrageously expensive integrated government website<\/a>, and projects spinning out of control that haven’t yet hit the headlines.”<\/p>\n The released emails have numerous redactions, most to protect security information, and Shared Services Canada declined to fill in the blanks.<\/p>\n A spokesperson for Shared Services Canada, Andr\u00e9e Gregoire, said the agency “consulted” with Statistics Canada before taking the web servers offline, though a released email uses the word “notified.”<\/p>\n Canadians had access to statistical information throughout the outages through an off-line telephone service, she added.<\/p>\n The Statistics Canada website handles hundreds of thousands of inquiries on peak days, whereas the telephone service handles relatively simple inquiries, usually a few thousand in a year. \u00a0<\/p>\n Shared Services Canada was created in 2011 to centralize and standardize the federal government’s IT services. But a recent report slammed the agency for its failures over the years. (Shared Services Canada)<\/p>\n Smith says the released emails show nothing has changed since his departure in September.<\/p>\n “I resigned [partly because] \u2026 Shared Services Canada had too much control over Statistics Canada’s ability to publish its information, and that was inconsistent with the agency’s necessary independence,” he said, adding that the IT agency’s “general dysfunction was hobbling Statistics Canada’s operations.”<\/p>\n
\n – Wayne Smith, former head of Statistics Canada<\/cite>\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n
Morning after<\/h2>\n
![\"Anil](\"https:\/\/i.cbc.ca\/1.3767185.1474112974!\/fileImage\/httpImage\/image.jpg_gen\/derivatives\/original_300\/anil-arora.jpg\")
<\/p>\n‘Consulted’ with StatsCan<\/h2>\n
![\"Shared](\"https:\/\/i.cbc.ca\/1.3888111.1481232884!\/fileImage\/httpImage\/image.jpg_gen\/derivatives\/original_620\/shared-services-canada-data-centre.jpg\")
<\/p>\n\n