I think when we deal at a staff level at Public Works or at Defence Construction Canada, where they have the specific expertise, I think they are quite empathetic.
Her name escapes me, but there is an employee at Defence Construction Canada who, as part of her Ph.D. thesis, actually made a direct correlation that the higher the engineering quality the lower the operating and maintenance over the next 20 years.
I think they understand it, and this is not unique to the federal government, but the challenge we have is that those who can actually make the change to the procurement are inevitably the other department.
So we are hoping, by speaking to you, in the collective wisdom of this committee, that perhaps you can shake something loose so that we can have a meeting of the minds.
Procurement is becoming very complex. One of our concerns is sometimes that the procurement methodology is done in isolation of either the technical expertise to evaluate proposals or to scope the work or sometimes even outside the context of the ultimate end user, because we can do a better job if we have a little bit more context of what the desired outcome is.
There is a pressure in government to do everything empirically, to evaluate proposals empirically. I will quote Albert Einstein, who is a little brighter than I am; he said that “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” That is a very true statement.
There's a myth that as a private sector we want a completely objective process. We don't. We are professional services. We understand subjectivity, provided it is done fairly, transparently, and we understand the rules going in. We want to protect your right to hire those firms that are going to do the best job for you.
In that way, we can adjust our business cases accordingly. And your interest is, to change that business case, we want to raise our game and be a preferred service provider to the federal government.