Thank you for meeting with us today. I appreciate a lot of things you've said.
Your article in the Ottawa Business Journal, which is how we found you to be a witness today, talks a lot about the difficulty in procuring business with the government, the paperwork. We've heard that repeatedly from all the other witnesses. We've had indigenous businesses here that have been struggling with it, and women as well. It seems that it's across the board. All demographics have trouble dealing with the government in the RFP process, but your article quoted a few people who were saying that it's similar to dealing with any large company.
How much of this do you think is the issue of the complexity and the paperwork of our RFP process, and how much is perhaps the fact that the SMEs just don't have the resources to bid on an RFP that would be considered normal if you're bidding on a Fortune 500 company RFP?
What I want to get at is how much of it is solvable by cleaning up our RFP process, which is, when we talk to businesses, very clearly quite onerous and difficult, and how much of it is, “too bad, that's just the way the world is”?