Government Operations committee  It breaks my heart--I'd like to be a hard-nosed businessman, but I'm not very good at that--when I go into government departments and see them doing drudge work the hard way, with errors and mistakes, and I have a solution: I want to give it to them. I love that, and my team love

Government Operations committee  Absolutely, there's no question about it. It's very good. Maybe I shouldn't raise this other point, but if you remember, I said earlier that it's very difficult for me to sell to the federal government for anything more than $25,000. This contract is more than $25,000.

Government Operations committee  It's a very big thing. Personally I have concerns about some of the socio-economic benefits that are put into some of these projects. My past experience with CF-18 procurement made me wonder. It is a good idea if it is exercised correctly, but you have to be very cautious that it

Government Operations committee  I have a different opinion from some of the points brought forward earlier. I can only talk about my own limited experience with my own companies.

Government Operations committee  It was part of our business plan when we set the company up 20 years ago. We don't want to compete on a level playing field with everyone else. I don't want to be one of 4,000 organizations offering a better web page. We've developed products that no one else has, and innovation

Government Operations committee  Yes, absolutely. The fact that we have an initial test department set up and that there is funding in place for that test department gives me a little more freedom and security financially, so I have hired more people over the summer than I would have done otherwise. That's the f

Government Operations committee  Oh, absolutely. In fact, I just came from a meeting here and I'm off next week to do a first install. We work very closely with the client.

Government Operations committee  Okay. IRAP is great, except that we're constantly teased by hearing things like this: “Well, this is the last one because they are going to cut the program, so forget it after this, but oh no, they've renewed it, and there is a bit more...”. It just goes on. So there's an insecur

Government Operations committee  It's quite simple. Up to $5,000, you can buy stuff with a credit card fairly easily with a certain level of management approval. Beyond that, up to $25,000, there's a higher level of approval needed. I referenced earlier that there are different approvals with DISO and everythi

Government Operations committee  It's difficult for me to answer that because now we're tightly connected with these people and we've been backwards and forwards for the last year. We know the people and we like them. They're good people.

Government Operations committee  Yes, we are using IRAP. Again, that was one of Keith Jackson's initiatives four or five years ago. Our original problem was that we have an SR and ED. Our original understanding was that the two overlapped and you take one or the other, but that's not true.

Government Operations committee  Yes, it's excellent.

Government Operations committee  By accident, actually. We were just at GTEC yesterday. At last year's GTEC, we met somebody who explained the process to us. In practice, I had received an e-mail a month or two earlier, but it was one of 500 e-mails from someone I didn't know, and it just went in the junk folder

Government Operations committee  I'm looking at procurement in a different way. From my point of view, we just need a simpler process. We need to take out some of the restrictions. Once we've dealt with the technical issues that we need to settle to end up with procurement, then we get caught in all sorts of th

Government Operations committee  To add to the BDC thing, we used to take money from BDC, but we don't anymore, so I think that says a lot. I love SR and ED now. I love IRAP. The point you make is right. Because we're not just running a business. We're doing many things. You don't want to have to lay people of