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Shared Services Canada – the government’s IT department – assures that it can support the teleworking employees necessary to maintain “essential services” throughout government.

But since the Treasury Board Secretariat issued a directive to all federal departments to allow teleworking when possible, SSC has been regularly imploring bureaucrats to keep VPN use to a minimum.

“When using VPN, we ask that only necessary applications be used and to keep Internet usage to what is essential — do not use streaming services and use social media only if needed,” Shared Services Canada president Paul Glover tweeted on Tuesday.

After that tweet, Shared Services confirmed to the National Post that it is in fact blocking access to certain websites while on a government VPN.

“Until network capacity is increased departments are taking action to limit non-essential network usage and reducing non-essential activities and blocking non-essential social media sites for all Government of Canada (I.e. video streaming, personal social media accounts). Shared Services is monitoring the situation in real time and will make adjustments as required on an ongoing basis,” the department said in an email.

Shared Services also told the National Post that the department is “working with vendors” to increase capacity throughout their network so they can handle more tasks and users throughout government in the near future.

The department wouldn’t say if it was buying or renting more network capacity. Rather, it maintained that a plan was being developed to deliver extra capacity as needed.

Daviau, the president of Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada, said it’s frustrating for professionals who just want to do their jobs.

“If I can see a silver lining in this, it’s that it may be the push in the back the government needs to invest more in teleworking infrastructure and technology. That way, public servants can have more flexibility as to how and where they work at all times. Necessity is the mother of invention,” Daviau said.

• Email: cnardi@postmedia.com | Twitter: ChrisGNardi