The first thing is that the impact to small businesses is unknown. What we have are some examples where we know that there has been some detrimental impact to small business. We believe that by going through this shared service, one large contract to one company, it's going to force us to have to pony up to these big companies and form new relationships, and we believe that in terms of our innovation we're going to have to all get in line with the Orwellian way. It's like you'll march this way and you'll all do it the same way, so we think innovation will be completely lost. Once that has happened and small businesses have been destroyed, there will be no turning back. There will be no industry to turn to when this all fails.
So our frustration with GENS is, number one, we just don't agree with the fundamental policy that PWGSC is proceeding with to really be a broker of services to other departments. We think PWGSC has a position to be accountable to the taxpayer and really has to put and maintain the control of the solutions. So if they want to implement shared services, PWGSC should be the provider of the shared services to that department, not a middleman to a large company.
Therefore we think that the small business has a role to play--and so do large businesses. We think that everybody has a role to play. What we specifically are asking for with GENS is to break it up into small contracts, small projects that we can bid on and be successful at winning because the bar is not too high.
We think that they need to remove professional services from the contract altogether. There are two contracts that exist today, TBIPs and SBIPs, that have been put in place and were very well received. There were, I might add, very good consultations on that, which we participated in. It took a long time, but everybody was satisfied, and they exist today. We would like PWGSC to continue to use those vehicles to allow us to continue to go after business and provide the innovative solutions, cost-effective innovative solutions, I might add.