I'm glad you put it that way, because there are some rules that need to be streamlined and removed, and then there are others that need to be added. It's a complicated process.
What should be streamlined and removed? There has already been quite a lot of work done on this by public servants. Internally, there was a red-tape reduction report, which you can find online and to which I'll make sure the committee gets the link via the clerk. These were public servants' testimonies about the ways they need to see procurement rules and HR rules. I'm trying to think of the other one. Maybe there was something around communications. Basically, it was where they saw significant barriers to their ability to be efficient and innovative that are imposed on them by rules that don't add any value and distract them from doing the good work they want to do.
That would be a great place to start to streamline these rules: taking a hard look at the Treasury Board policy suite, which is largely incomprehensible. There is nothing more disabling to your action than following those rules or trying to understand those rules. It's years of drift of adding new bullet points. You can be in section 10.1.2.3.4 and you're reading to try to understand whether or not you can adopt open source or something. These things are not enabling. That has never been their objective. Their objective—and I'm going to use a rude word here, but it comes out regularly in interviews with public servants—is that internal rules are meant to cover your ass; they are not meant to lead to good outcomes. I hear this constantly from public servants. That exact line, when I did my Ph.D research, came up so many times that I had to note as a remarkable finding the amount of times that particular phrase was used.
This is like shifting the accountability culture to one where the focus is on accountability for results and accountability for learning and iteration versus accountability by following all these rules, doing all the documentation and producing something that didn't work, but at least Treasury Board is happy. That's obviously what no one wants, including public servants, because that is deeply demotivating as an accountability model.
Those are some places to start, I think. Mr. Boots probably has lots of thoughts on that as someone who's lived that experience in Treasury Board.