In the 2023 federal budget, the Trudeau government vowed to find savings of more than $15-billion over four years.
It may want to start with the phone bill.
In 2022, the federal government spent more $165-million for more than 944,000 land and cellphone lines but, according to data quietly filed in the House of Commons days before the budget, more than 290,000 of those lines were “dormant” — not used once for three months or more.
The data was tabled as a result of a written order paper question from Conservative MP Adam Chambers.
“People are working differently,” Chambers said. “How many phone lines does the government pay for, firstly, and are there ones we’re paying for that nobody’s using? Turns out almost a third of the phone lines are dormant.”
One government agency, the Office of the Ombudsman for the Canadian Armed Forces and Department of National Defence, spent about $50,000 in 2022 for 214 phone lines and never used half of them. That included paying for 129 landlines, not one of which was used for the last three months of 2022 or longer.
A spokesperson for the ombudsman’s office explained that, before the pandemic, all the landlines it was paying for were active but during the pandemic its employees worked from home. As a result, the lines in the office went silent.
Ombudsman spokesperson Sarah Dolan said the office is now moving permanently to a hybrid work environment where employees will use a mix of cellphones or use an Internet-based telephone application like Microsoft Teams. That transition, Dolan said, is expected to be complete by the end of the summer.
The Ombudsman’s office is unique in that it is one of a handful of government agencies that arrange for and report on its own telecommunications services separately. The vast majority of phone lines used by the federal government are procured by Shared Services Canada, the federal agency that is essentially the federal government’s information technology department.
Shared Services Canada said that, so far this year, it had “decommissioned” more than 50,000 phone lines and is working with other government departments to decommission the rest or put them into use.
Chambers, who is a member of the House of Commons finance committee, said finding and cutting wasteful government spending is particularly important right now.
“The former Bank of Canada governor said deficits last year are one of the reasons why interest rates haven’t had to go higher. So if we want to have interest rates come down, we have to stop the deficits and unnecessary wasteful spending,” Chambers said.
Most of the phone lines the government purchases come from Bell Canada.
The phone bill from Bell topped $125-million in 2022 or about 75 per cent of everything the government paid for cellphones and land lines.
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