Spending about a million dollars each year to retain government Blackberry messages is not a wise use of public funds, says Education Minister Jordan Brown.
Brown was responding to a question by Charlottetown-Parkdale MLA Hannah Bell during Thursday’s question period on whether the province had looked into recommendations made by Canada’s information commissioner on retaining instant messages.
Bell had first raised the issue last fall when she tabled the commissioner’s special report, which stated instant messages present an “unacceptable risk to the rate of access of information.”
Brown, whose office oversees the Archives and Records Act, said during Thursday’s question period he was happy the issue had returned to the floor, stating the province had looked into the recommendation.
“(Bell) led us all to believe there’s a magic switch we could all flip (to retain messages),” said Brown. “There’s not a magic switch and as it turns out, there’s about a million–dollar cost each year to go and do that.”
Brown was referring to Bell’s statement from last fall where she said retaining messages was “literally an on/off switch on the server… we certainly have the technology available to do so, but we have to have the policy in place.”
However, on Thursday Brown said the software to retain instant messages would require an implementation cost of $725,000 with an annual renewal cost of $475,000. He said costs for the implementation of storage would be about $150,000 with an annual $75,000 to increase storage.
Bell said those software costs were comparable to the costs required to implement record management systems in federal departments.
“I know so, because I built them,” said Bell. “Minister, perhaps you could advise how much accountability is truly worth?”
Brown said the cost of implementing those would be the same as hiring 10 additional teachers.
“For somebody that actually built that technology you’d think that person would know a little more about it and not be misleading this house,” said Brown.
Speaker Buck Watts warned Brown that using the term misleading in the house was “very, very close” to unparliamentary.
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