This article was previously published on CDS’s LinkedIn in December 2025. Check out the original post.
New People Behind The Service product testimonial for GC Forms from Justin Lane (Website Developer), Department of Finance Canada (FIN)!
Working in government, there can be many factors that impact the speed of delivery. To meet the public’s needs for time-sensitive services, GC teams may need to deliver very quickly.
When changes to the U.S. Tariffs were announced in March 2025, the Department of Finance Canada (FIN) needed to quickly deliver a consultation for the public’s input (details). Initially, they had only a week to do this, so Justin’s team needed a speedy solution that met their needs for accessibility, bilingualism, and security, especially because they were collecting Protected B data.
Using GC Forms, FIN was able to readily adopt and launch their form in days, enabling them to receive consultation responses. Read Justin’s experiences below to learn about the beneficial impacts GC Forms can have on your service delivery.
Haven’t heard of CDS products before?
The CDS Platform team builds secure, accessible, and bilingual products to enable public servants to deliver modern digital services themselves. Our products can be used individually or assembled together, allowing departments to get started immediately without procurement costs or overhead, while meeting security and accessibility standards. Our goal is to empower GC teams to focus on what they do best, serving Canada.
Beneficial impacts of using GC Forms
Multiple GC Forms features sped up our review process before adoption. 🔎 ⚡
GC Forms is secure up to Protected B, moving us to the development stage quicker than if we needed a security audit
Because of the sensitive nature of the information included in our consultation, as well as the sensitive nature of the responses we intended on receiving, we needed a secure Protected B platform. We have access to other platforms, but were unsure if they could meet these requirements. Given the short development timeline, we didn’t have time to have IT security or SSC do a security audit on other available platforms.
Because of its full Protected B support, GC Forms saved us a lot of time and effort and allowed us to move into the development phase much quicker. This was one of our primary reasons for switching to GC Forms.
Accessibility is top of mind for GC Forms, saving us time when reviewing the product
Given the fact that GC Forms was built by a team that is very familiar with GC web accessibility and UI/UX standards, we saved time on having to do a full web accessibility review.
- Blog that may interest you: Standardizing and Digitizing Government Forms in Canada: A Digital Service Network Spotlight.
Building our forms was sped up by the product’s design. 🍁 ⚡
Forms are GC-branded, increasing users’ trust
The platform adheres to the Canada.ca common look and feel. This not only saves us time having to fully rebrand the consultation form ourselves, but also allows us to create an experience that people in Canada can trust is legitimate.
Bilingualism is embedded in form design
GC Forms was built with bilingualism in mind. This allows us to deal with one form for English/French instead of two separate forms. This greatly speeds up the development and response gathering process.
- Blog that may interest you: Finding a truly bilingual way to collect data: GC Forms.
Dedicated support team to help with any product questions
The GC Forms support team offered quick responses to any questions concerning the platform’s usage. With other platforms, unless you pay for a top tier package, you do not receive this level of support.
We’re saving time actioning form responses too! ⚙️ ⚡
Data export formats enable us to automatically update our database, quicker than manually
GC Forms allows us to export our consultation responses as JSON and CSV formats. We were able to write a script to parse these responses and add them into an existing internal database for reporting purposes.
In the past, updating the database would all be done manually by an analyst. Through this method, we can provide fully detailed reports at a much quicker pace.
- Guidance: Getting form responses.
Learn more and share with GC colleagues!
GC Forms is being used for many public-facing use cases across the GC, including:
- Grant application forms
- Program intake forms
- Forms with conditional logic that have multiple steps and flows for users
Think we can help with your service delivery or a colleague’s? Share this article with them!