In my four and a half years at Industry Canada, I have reduced quite markedly the number of consultants we use.
The auto situation was a one-off. If we were going to recommend that the government spend $10 billion, I wanted to have on-the-ground capacity to do the due diligence, so we hired a substantial number of auditors to validate the restructuring plans that GM was giving us. Indeed, the first time out we sent them back because they were inadequate, so I needed to retain external consultants to assist in doing our job, but the overall management approach is to not use management consultants, to not use consultants generally.
With regard to your point about fat and this and that, it's our job, as senior bureaucrats, to manage, and managing is about making choices. It was the same thing when I was working as a deputy minister under Mr. Rae or Mr. Harris. They both had constraints, and you do the best you can with the amount given to you.
What has changed over the last little while is that there is a much greater degree of transparency. Mr. Regan raised a number of points about there not being enough information. There has been a change over the last while with regard to what I would call transparency. I will give you two factoids. We, as a department, have appeared 36 times in front of various parliamentary committees just in this fiscal year. There is much more dialogue taking place between parliamentarians—