We have a tangible example because of the situation we've found ourselves in over the last couple of years. When we saw the government was moving to outsource CERB, for example, we could not for the life of us understand why they were doing that.
People who come to work for ESDC are lifers. These are people who start there and work their way up the ranks. You often find people who have worked across various business lines at ESDC. Many of them at some point would have worked in a call centre and on the front end. They have the ability and capacity—because they've worked in EI, CPP or OAS—to answer questions and do the service delivery, so the department is incredibly flexible.
When CERB happened, we had enough folks to pull some from less critical services and put them on a hotline and in direct service. We were able to successfully argue with the government that they didn't need the contract. I think they ended up keeping it for only a few months because of the pressure we applied and the volunteers who came from other business lines when we asked them to sub in.
In my experience, I haven't seen a need for it, because I've seen the internal flexibility to address those one-offs.