It's an excellent question. From within, government procurement never really worked properly and now that I'm in the private sector, it doesn't work at all, depending on your perspective.
The issue is government procurement is driven towards low cost and IT is not low cost in all cases. It's got to be best value. Right now IT procurement is fragmented between line departments that buy some of their stuff through Public Works because it's in this domain, through SSC in this domain, and a lot of departments don't even know how it works themselves and you look at the private sector on top of that, trying to do business with them, because the private sector has a lot to offer.
As I said in my opening statement, I leveraged those. I could not have accomplished what I did without the private sector helping Transport Canada deliver what we did. We didn't have the people. We had to buy those services and we bought them cost effectively through open, fair procurement methodologies.
Right now, I think government procurement is a mess, and I'm seeing it from the outside and it needs to be fixed. I think one of these things is by creating a centre of excellence where you could have it identified and work with government departments and industry to try to position this to look forward, and it's been tried before. But we have to get away from the low cost. We need the best value. Otherwise, things get into low cost and they nickel and dime and nickel and dime and before you know it, you're paying three times what you would have paid for it in the first place.
Some will argue the ETI is a perfect example of that. I won't comment on that. I wasn't involved in the procurement, so I'll leave it at that.