Thank you, Chair.
I join my colleagues in welcoming both of you back to committee. I know that you both have appeared twice, in November of 2022 and early January of 2023.
I just want to recapture what we learned from you back then. I think we knew there was an issue when we put the arrive scam issue on the agenda of this committee, but I think what I learned from you is that government relies heavily on IT vendors and management consultants and, as you stated again today, has done little to hire this expertise in-house and/or train public servants. We also learned that it is hard to measure value for money or even how successfully completed a project is because of the ambiguous nature of how we collect data, and, finally, that spending on external consultants is growing. Mr. Boots has provided some great data with regard to that.
You mentioned lucrative contracting opportunities for public servants. Mr. Boots, as a former public servant, does all this contribute to public servants contracting with the Government of Canada to do work that they should be paid for—