Yes, and this echoes a lot of what Mr. Boots offered in his opening remarks. There has been a tendency in the Government of Canada, I think historically, to layer on more rules and oversight to create new parliamentary officers, new external scrutineers when there's been some sort of scandal. While, of course, we're clearly not advocating for no rules and, in fact, the research in clean, high quality IT procurement focuses a lot on what the guardrails should be and on building a culture of responsible public service around that to avoid things like conflict of interest, for example, I think the habit we've had in Canadian public administration—layering on more rules as a way of ensuring accountability—has actually had this perverse effect of undermining accountability and seriously undermining the effectiveness of public servants.
There are tons of examples that you can find. A classic one that people loved to talk about, maybe 10 years ago, was that, when the federal government first started using social media, there were, in some cases, these 20-step approval processes to release a 140-character tweet. You can also look to the Federal Field Notes website written by Paul Craig, which Mr. Boots referenced, to find some great examples of this sort of internal administrative burden. In one case, the documentation required to publish a five-page website basically had more words than the entire edition of The Great Gatsby. We mire public servants in so many rules and compliance requirements, and the reporting burden—which is really well-documented, not just in IT but across the study of Canadian governance—that it has two effects that are relevant to this question of IT contracting.
One, it means that when it makes sense to build in-house and to try to adopt modern service design practices like user research or agile multidisciplinary teams, public servants actually can't do it. It's really difficult to do the right thing. We add so many rules that they can't be nimble enough. Streamlining those rules would, I think, create space for public servants to do some more of this work internally.
The second piece of it is that when you have those rules in place, it actually becomes difficult for vendors in some cases to work in modern ways with the federal public service because there are tight rules around things like “project gating” or the way that money flows, and that's because they can't pull together a multidisciplinary team of internal public servants because HR rules don't allow it. That's why I think the focus of this latest spotlight on the problems of IT contracting should meaningfully lead to a reset of policy with a focus on enabling good public service and a focus on what matters, which is conflict of interest and the responsible bidding processes, not creating documentation burdens for public servants. That's not going to help. In fact, it will make it worse.