That's an excellent question.
I think the fact is that, side-by-side, growth in the public service—which is, in part, in line with the growth of the population but is also a significant percentage jump—has been mentioned in several media articles. Alongside this, especially in the IT space, great growth in contracting should raise questions about.... On the one hand, I suppose you could ask whether we are doing so much more in government right now—more ambitious programming and more ambitious policies—that we need more people. That could be true, and I think there's a debate to be had about whether the amount of contracting and the growth in staff is justified by the ambition of the government's agenda.
On the question of the internal capacity-building piece and why that hasn't perhaps displaced the need for contracting, that's such a good question. I think the Canada School of Public Service does what it can to retrain and upscale public servants, but there's no mandatory training right now in modern procurement practices, even for procurement officers. This is something that the Auditor General has identified as a problem, but certainly senior leadership across the federal government has risen through a system in which they were never asked to understand technology.
In fact, often what I hear from public servants when I interview them is that senior leaders would like to insulate themselves from tech projects because they know they so often fail. There's a kind of learned helplessness and a willful blindness to these problems and an assumption that the IT community will handle them, but we don't tend to raise IT experts to the position of deputy minister, for example. This is more that you move up through the policy ranks. We have this cadre of senior leaders who have power and influence and are responsible for a lot of this oversight who sign off on things like big IT contracts but aren't getting that mandatory training to be good stewards and understand the basics of technology. Other jurisdictions are focusing on the executive ranks. It's something that we could think about doing better in Canada as part of mandatory deputy minister training.