Madam Chair, I think that's a very good question. It is an area I personally am concerned about, the department is concerned about, and the Department of Public Works is concerned about.
Not related to any specific program--obviously I can't comment on that--but when you ask industry to take on the full-service delivery of something, and to do it over a 20-year period, even though you'll renegotiate labour rates on an annual or biannual basis, and you ask them to take on the management and deliver, let's say, power by the hour for an aircraft, or a ship being available to go to sea on a daily basis, and you ask them to do all that management and take all that risk, there's a price to that.
How much risk do you transfer to that vendor, to that industry, and how much does the Government of Canada take itself? It goes to the question of limits of liability if there's an accident. It goes to the complexity of the job you're asking them to do; they're taking on a management function that we can't do any more.
My group had 13,000 people before program review. Today there are 4,000 people. I don't have 300 people to put on an aircraft fleet to do its day-to-day maintenance and management; I have 25 people. So a certain degree of risk is being passed from the government to those major industries. They are very capable of doing it, but there's a cost to that.
We're looking at that very carefully and asking, is too much risk being passed to vendors, and what's the price of that risk?