That goes into the 2,500 grievances we have on the table right now. These are not areas where we don't have the expertise in-house. These are not projects that our public servants are not prepared to deliver or perform. On the ground and in the capacity, our members are seeing contracts being placed for outside workers to come in and do exactly the same job—sit next to them and do the same project—and are crying that this is a public servant job.
It has to do with the hiring practices. It also has to do with the “de-professionalization” of the role of HR within the public service. They took away the HR resources and they left hiring up to the managers. When a professional like an engineer or an IT professional, who has no expertise in hiring...it's much easier to put a contract together with an outside agency, to say, “Hire what I need”, versus coming up with criteria to hire within. Especially in the Department of National Defence—I don't have the actual numbers right now—we are seeing a reliance on what is called internal contracting out to DCC, Defence Construction Canada, which has way beyond extended their mandate to provide services to the Department of National Defence.