We spend a fair bit of time learning from and sharing best practices with like jurisdictions. In some cases, they look to us, and in others, we look to them.
I think our e-procurement solution is going to do a lot for us. It's going to mean that a lot of things we are now paying people to do will be automated, and we'll be able to look at data in the aggregate to leverage the federal spend.
A little-known fact is that PSPC handles 12% of the contracts but 80% of the money volume. That's appropriate. It means that our workforce is focused on the really complex procurements.
As to your question about defence procurement, I would say that it's more similar than we would think to complex procurement. Buying a nuclear facility, vaccines, building bridges, many of these complex procurements have similar features in that there are unknowns. There are risks, and you have to plan for them. There are complex global supply chains. Managing that is the kind of work that we do.
As well, we're noticing that procurement life cycles are getting shorter and shorter. We're finding that more of the money we invest goes into in-service support rather than the original acquisition. Managing that aspect of procurement is increasingly important. In respect of the prime contractors we hire, we're noticing that keeping an eye on how their supply chain functions is as much interest to us as it is to them.
In regard to best practices, you're right that Canada has a bit of a distributed decision-making model. However, both our minister and the President of the Treasury Board have modernizing procurement in their mandate letters, and we are working closely with them on just that.
I've talked with you about our e-procurement solution. The other thing we're doing is streamlining our contracts. I am a lawyer by training, and I know that my profession can sometimes say that something is risk averse and that we therefore need to add a contract term or clause. The result, quite frankly, is that some of our contracts are a bit unwieldy. We hear this from business as well. Interestingly, they are also sometimes risk averse and will ask for long contracts. Increasingly, however, we're working with them to streamline where we need to and then agree on certain terms. Intellectual property is a thorny issue. Sometimes it can be used for competitive purposes by big incumbents. In other circumstances, the government needs to own some of it so that it can re-compete down the road and benefit from innovations.
We're doing a lot to modernize, to collaborate, and to really make this procurement function the most streamlined as possible so that the government of the day, whatever its policy priorities are, can leverage procurement for socio-economic benefit, whether it's green procurement, benefiting aboriginal communities, or leveraging the Canadian industrial base.
Thank you.