Thank you, Chair.
I'm going to address my questions to Ms. Hart, general counsel for the Public Service Alliance of Canada.
Thank you for being here.
We have seen, in the course of the last eight years with this government, significant growth simultaneously in the public service and in spending on outsourcing. You would expect that these things would be, in some sense, inversely proportional. If you had more capacity in the public service, you would have less outsourcing, or, if you had a declining public service, you might see more instances of outsourcing. Strangely, we're seeing growth on both those levels. We're expanding the public service, and we're sending more work outside of government.
This committee, as you know, has been doing work on the arrive scam scandal, which seems to demonstrate that, not only are we outsourcing, but we're outsourcing the process of outsourcing. In the case of GC Strategies, they were not hired to do work; we outsourced the process of doing the outsourcing. This is particularly bizarre to me. It seems that the public service, if they don't have the capacity to do certain work internally, should at least have the capacity to directly identify the people who can do the work and do that outsourcing work directly rather than having multiple layers of outsourcing in between.
I want to ask if PSAC has made representations to senior levels of the public service or to ministers directly about these issues of outsourcing. What kinds of conversations have you had with ministers about this, and what kind of feedback have you gotten?