Thank you so much. I think it's a really interesting question.
I would say off the bat that the situations we've seen in the news where public servants were simultaneously working for a department and then also running contracting companies was a huge surprise, because I don't think that's a normal occurrence. But what does seem very normal is that when you reach kind of the mid to end state of your public service career in IT, it's very normal to go work for a large IT company or for a large IT vendor, because you have a lot of pre-existing relationships with your colleagues and counterparts.
If you're a departmental chief information officer, you're probably never going to become an ADM, but you can make a lot of money going to go work for a large IT company. You're friends with all your other departmental CIOs who you used to work with. I think for those companies, it's very attractive for them to hire retired public servants who have a lot of previous connections. You see other things like large consulting firms running demo days, where they invite a lot of senior public servants to go see some cool things that new start-ups in Canada are doing while they also gather a lot of notes on what they will then pitch back to departments to sell them some new management or IT product or whatever.
You do see those sorts of patterns. One way to fight that is to make it possible, as I mentioned earlier, to have a more successful long-term career with market-competitive salaries while you're still in the public service. Of course, I have friends who have left the public service to go make triple their previous salary working for a large tech firm. I left the federal government and I work for a provincial government. I'm still a public servant. I'm paid exactly the same as I was in my old job, and I'm very happy to be able to play a role in having a public impact. But for other people in different situations, it's very understandable. They leave to make triple the salary.
It's hard to say no to tripling your salary. That's an appealing thing. That has consequences for this somewhat cozy relationship that you see in news articles between the super-large tech providers to government and the public service.