I would say it would be to discuss with senior policy officials to see what the procurement standards are, what the rules and regulations are, and whether we are following them. If there are some that we might not be following because of the emergency, what else can we have in place that could compensate for them and that we can check afterward?
The first thing is to talk with the people in procurement and then make sure that all officials are aware of potential conflict of interest and the appearance of conflict of interest. I would say that Mr. Dion's team is offering training or will actually provide you with guidelines on specific situations.
As I said, one of the items I was pointing out was to consider conflict of interest before awarding the contract. I think all this has to be done beforehand. It's not really rocket science, to be honest. It's just that there are rules that are already in place, and we want to make sure that we are actually following them. If we can't, for whatever good reason, then we have to support that choice with reasons, but what Canada has in place right now is excellent. Under the procurement system, it's excellent.
The conflict of interest code and the act are good also, but people don't understand them correctly. The danger is, I would say that you need to sit down and talk to everyone who is what I call a CLO, a “chief loophole officer”, the person who would always respect the letter of the law but never the spirit of the law. That's what you really need to focus on, to say there is nothing great in finding loopholes. That's never good in the long term; it's always bad.