Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, and thanks very much to everybody for being here with us this morning.
No offence to the consulting engineers, but I'm going to be focusing on this group for the first round. I'm looking forward to having some other questions.
We are here today and have you folks here today because it's no secret that there's some controversy over GENS and what the government is doing in shared services.
Right off the bat, I think everybody wants to make sure that government conducts its affairs in the most efficient way possible, because we are responsible to taxpayers. On the other hand, the government is not the same thing as the private sector, and there are other dynamics the government has to keep in mind.
As a former businessperson, I am very much of the view that taxpayers are important, and we need to make sure we run our government and government services as efficiently and effectively as possible. That does not necessarily mean lower cost. I thought the example from Mr. Steeves that you don't hire the lowest-cost employee to do the best job was perfect.
We are waiting for a report from Public Works on GENS, the impetus for shared services, and some of the issues behind the drive to shared services. We don't have that report yet, so I would like to ask you a couple of things.
The controversy seems to be that if we go to a greater use of shared services, larger companies will automatically be used to do that work and SMEs will suffer--fewer SMEs will be used. We're also facing a bit of an uncertainty about whether an SME that provides staffing is the same as an SME that provides ICT work in the larger sense.
Mr. Lavoie, you mentioned that using a large company, such as any of the large telecommunications or ICT companies, would not reduce the number of SMEs involved in government work. This is a rather long introduction to the question, but I would like to hear you address this elephant in the room--the question of whether SMEs are going to suffer or not.
I leave it open to the other two witnesses to help us with this question.