This was an egregious violation of procurement policies and an egregious violation of...a lot of different ways in which contracting out has bloated what people generally read as the public sector. Public servants actually do not make up the entirety of the public sector. A huge amount of that is shady relationships and contractors—which are sometimes needed, of course.
I'm speaking here as a policy analyst and as the president of a union that represents a lot of policy analysts. Even in that specialized world of policy development, contracting out is normal. There are databases we don't have access to. There are fields of information that we just can't have access to, but this whole element of not being able to build the institutional memory to be able to carry out our tasks in a regular way is a consistent problem.
When people talk about the bloat of the public sector, for our members it's these vast webs of contractor relationships that could probably be done far more cheaply, more effectively and in the spirit of building institutional memory and capacity in-house.
We do not believe that the public sector is overly bloated. We don't agree that the public sector requires a lot of trimming over the next five to 10 years. We do need this contractor relationship and this vast web of contractors to be severely reined in, however, because we feel that our members are qualified to do the type of work we do best, with the correct levels of oversight, which are very stringent levels of oversight.