“The officials argue the gadget could save hundreds of dollars a year in paper and printing costs for each staff member equipped with the device,” Turbid reports. “Treasury board spokesman Pierre-Alain Bujold said the iPads — not laptops — were picked for the project because they were lightweight, user-friendly, had a long-lasting battery and allowed for easy note-taking.”
Turbid reports, “It would cost about $7 million to outfit all of Ottawa’s roughly 6,743 high-level bureaucrats with the new high-tech device.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Using iPads to save some money makes way more sense to us than Ottawa having 6,743 “high-level bureaucrats.”
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Dan K.” for the heads up.]
I say fire 2/3 of them and reward the remaining ones with iPads!
Sheesh. We have waaaay too much government.
All Canadians are entitled to Life, Liberty and Good Government!
People have been overdosing on government for so long, they’re unable to see the absurdity of it all.
In general, regardless of the developed country you choose, “government” is at least 10x too big.
Most people are generally too stupid get it and/or too lazy to care.
Government of Saskatchewan already did this. I guess now the Feds feel left out.
Just went to the Apple.ca website. 6743 64Gb ipads with HST (Ontario) equals $5,700,000.
I would gladly do the contract for the CDN government for $1,000,000 less.
Could this be like the sponsorship scandal?
You just know that RIM lobbyists are going to descend on the Canadian politicians proposing this like vultures. How long will it be before we see a news story that the Canucks will be forced to consider the non-existent, untried RIM Playbook?
ONLY 6,743 high-level bureaucrats?
Silly Canucks, you need at least triple that number to do the job properly. Don’t worry about the cost, just print up some more bucks and pretend that you care.
Sincerely,
The Worst U.S. President in History
Re, ” Using iPads to save some money makes way more sense to us than Ottawa having 6,743 “high-level bureaucrats.”
Far less than the “…approximately 4.2 million civilian and military federal bureaucrats in the U.S.A.”
Good idea but the Feds are in bed with both Microsoft and RIM. You cannot have an iPhone, it can only be a Crackberry. Therefore I suspect that RIM may have some input into this down the road.
I’m at a major federal department, and its attempts to procure iPads (which I was researching) nixed by an IM/IT head who completely dismissed usage of iPads over security issues (including the idea that there’d be no way to ensure senior management wouldn’t jailbreak the devices!!)
Incidentally this same IM/IT head is totally in RIM’s backpocket…sssh
Sorry for the sentence fragments…I was editing my comment so as not to implicate where I work…
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The results of the pilot project are slated to be released within a few months.
Classic.
It sucks to be a low level bureaucrat…
I hear that 83.6% of high level federal employees are more productive when they can play Angry Birds in HD on the iPad.
Like Ottawa Mark, I also work for the feds. My IT guys are MS and RIM all the way. I couldn’t even justify an iPhone for data storage or any of the science apps that it has.
The reason? You might play MUSIC on it so therefore it is banned. Funny, I think I can play music on an iPad….but then again, I am not a deputy minister.
RIM won’t have any ‘input’. They don’t have an iPad killer.
I’m sure the Wintards would rather give each of those high-level bureaucrats $199 netbooks running a that awesome Windows 7 desktop OS. All the Wintards swear that a netbook is far more useful than an iPad and much, much cheaper. It must be Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field that is making these employees use iPads when we know they should have cheap netbooks so they can play Flash games.
@Buster,
There are people within our IT department who are Mac-sympathetic, and I actually use my MacBook Pro at work through Web Office, but the powers that be tend to be more entrenched. Still, the deputy minister is a Machead him/herself. (Again, just being careful
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Unwilling to wait for RIM to offer an option? Or perhaps, they don’t want to wait until there is an option from RIM, because they want iPad and they don’t want any pressure to use the “PlayBook.”
I am at a major Department in Ottawa. Just recently we allowed personal iPads to connect to the corporate environment via Citrix. It is catching on like wildfire. I finally sit back and have some serious job satisfaction now.
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