Contracting out has been a preoccupation of the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada. We represent professionals, including engineers, nurses and doctors—all regulated professionals who take their work on behalf of Canadians very seriously.
To watch things be contracted out.... It leads to higher costs to the government—it was 40% higher in the report—as well as less transparency, less accountability and lower quality of service. Most important, for me, is the loss of institutional knowledge because it is done out of house. That means we have to consistently be interdependent on contractors to even correct mistakes that they have made.
We need to make sure that we invest in the public service, so that they can maintain and deliver the reliable services on which Canadians depend and which they expect.