Nova Scotian politicians are rarely verbose.
Thanks very much to each of you for appearing before us today.
Mr. Corbett, good to see you.
I don't think every case of outsourcing is necessarily good or efficient, but I don't think one can say that the only reasons for outsourcing are matters of convenience. I think there are some cases where we can actually save tax dollars with outsourcing and still have the same service provided to Canadians. I'll give an example. When I was Minister of Public Works, one of the things we found is that our cost of managing our seven million square metres of office space—by the way, seven million square metres of office space would make us the biggest commercial landlord in Canada if we were private sector—was 20% higher than the private sector average, the BOMA average. Plus, we were terrible managers in terms of the buildings we had. I think the Department of Health was in a building that didn't have potable water. Every morning there was an exploding bag of something under my desk when I went into work from one of the buildings somewhere. Anyway, I digress.
The fact is, when we outsourced building cleaning, and it was done in two stages, it did save $70 million per year.
Would you accept that there are some cases of outsourcing where it's fairly clearcut that there are in fact savings for tax dollars and that there's nothing wrong with that if we can make a good case for it?