Canadian here. This has become a huge political football. People are blaming the current Liberal government, when the project was started by the Harper Conservatives. The full extent of just how fucked up it is has just now become public knowledge.

It is also a political pork barrel project.

> The project was meant to save costs by firing 1,200 employees handling payroll at various departments around the country and replacing them with about 500 people in a centralized location using Phoenix to handle most of the government’s payroll needs.

What's not written there is that the decommissioned long gun registry was located in a rural part of New Brunswick. When it was killed by the conservatives, they had a big political issue on their hands because suddenly hundreds of federal government clerical workers were out of a job in this area. So what was the solution? Re-hire the same people and put them on the Phoenix payroll project. Never mind that not one of them had any experience with IBM, Oracle, PeopleSoft, payroll, finances, or anything else related. They wanted butts in chairs in front of keyboards and to keep those people on the federal workforce payroll.

https://www.google.com/search?num=100&client=ubuntu&hs=ssW&c...

quick edit, history lesson:

early 1990s, Chretien Liberals: we need a gun registry

liberal party: okay we passed a gun registry law

liberal party: we need a pork barrel project to make these people in small town new brunswick happy, let's hire 500 people in miramichi

liberal party: this gun registry has now cost 400% of what was originally budgeted

liberal party, paul martin government loses an election to stephen harper and the conservative party

harper conservatives: we promise to scrap the long gun registry

harper conservatives: we've removed the long gun registry but now all these people are out of work and pissed off

harper conservatives: we need to overhaul our old payroll system that runs on a bunch of old minicomputers, let's hire ibm

harper conservatives: let's re-hire those people we fired and put the payroll center in small town new brunswick!

harper conservatives lose the 2015 elections

trudeau liberals: wtf is going on with this contract the previous government signed. wtf is going on with this clusterfuck of oracle, ibm, peoplesoft and porkbarrel politics of employing people who are not payroll specialists.

trudeau liberals, later on: seriously this is broken beyond repair