In 2011, the Government of Canada contracted American tech giant IBM to build a new system to manage its payments to civil servants. Beset by bugs, delays, and cost overruns, the new Phoenix pay system was finally unveiled in 2016. And it was a disaster. Civil servants were overpaid, underpaid, or not paid at all. The boondoggle racked up $3.5 billion in additional costs and forced the government to draw up plans to purchase an entirely new pay system. That, too, has been delayed.

In 2020, Ottawa launched ArriveCAN: a nimble, Swiss Army knife of an app to allow travellers to submit health, contact, and customs information. Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, a long chain of contractors, subcontractors, and sub-subcontractors worked on the software, to a cost of nearly $60 million. Behind the interface was a mess of bureaucracy and backroom dealings, with some contractors wining and dining with civil servants for a piece of the action in return. The auditor general later found such “glaring disregard for basic management and contracting practices” that pinning down the app’s actual cost proved impossible.

Today, the federal government is gearing up to deploy its newest program, an online system to manage federally provided payments. The Benefits Delivery Modernization program will create nothing less, the government said, than “a world-class service experience.” BDM has already taken over delivery for Old Age Security payments, and soon it will be responsible for Employment Insurance, then finally the Canada Pension Plan. The government budgeted $1.7 billion and promised to have it online by 2030. The auditor general has already warned that the program is at risk of going sideways, and civil servants say it will be the next white elephant.

These blunders have triggered parliamentary investigations, years of media scrutiny, and a cascade of audits and reviews. They’ve also pushed Ottawa to pledge to do better: to invest in more reliable technology, to get smarter about dealing with corporate contractors, and to develop a clearer vision for how to drag the government into the twenty-first century—albeit two and a half decades late.

But those who have to actually deal with Ottawa’s aging IT infrastructure say that the government still hasn’t learned the right lessons at all. In fact, things may be getting worse.

The government’s inability to buy and build technology right was a looming disaster, even before Donald Trump’s election last year. But now, as Prime Minister Mark Carney takes up the urgent task of weaning Canada off the American economy—finding new trading partners and building more things here at home—this has become even more urgent.

Get it right, and we deliver better programs—for less money and quickly. But if we keep getting it wrong, services will continue to worsen, costs will keep going up, and Canadians may start to lose faith that the government can do anything right.

And they would be justified in that cynicism.

When John Ogilvie joined my Zoom call, I was greeted by an anthropomorphic polar bear in a hoodie. “Lemme get rid of that avatar there,” the polar bear told me. “That’s for my son. I wanted him to be computer literate—so when he goes on a call, I put all kinds of avatars on it that he has to take off.”

Suddenly, the polar bear is replaced with a chuckling, bespeckled, white-haired Ogilvie, a long-time technology consultant who works extensively with the Canadian government.

A frustrated civil servant recommended Ogilvie’s name, specifically endorsing his frequent—scathing—LinkedIn posts about the state of government IT. He has taken particular aim at Shared Services Canada, or SSC, the agency ostensibly responsible for managing government technology and innovating new solutions. Except, Ogilvie writes, “SSC has an absolutely atrocious internal reputation for providing IT service.” He has chided the government for having little direction on improving cybersecurity and hampering scientific innovation with its ill-designed systems, and he has called for more data sovereignty in the face of an irredentist America.

“The work that I do, it’s flying around and sketching out: ‘Here’s how you guys can do it. Here’s a product you’ve never heard of,’” he told me. “It’s fun,” he says about his work, “but the job shouldn’t exist.”

A perpetual problem with how Canada acquires technology is counterintuitive. Government technologists—often spurred on by high-priced consultants with different ways of doing things than Ogilvie—have a terrible habit of building new things when existing products will do just fine. Because software can be designed from scratch, technology procurement can often become a form of wish-listing.

Imagine a government department seeking to buy a car. A committee of bureaucrats might hold a series of meetings and........

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