On sole-source contracts, definitely there are very few people who would recommend that as a best practice for the responsible stewardship of public funds. It doesn't tend to come up as the go-to model for how to issue these contracts.
I think that, in any given case, the process that you follow, whether it's a full and open process or whether you have standing offers ready to go, is always a balancing act between the need for resilience, responsiveness and being able to contract quickly and also having processes in place to make sure that it's competitive, accountable and transparent.
Of some of the specific reforms that I can speak to around procurement that I'd love to see, one comes back to the data question. If we followed something like the open contracting data standard that Mr. Boots mentioned, we'd be able to follow these contracts through each stage and really scrutinize what gets delivered. That's a huge issue. Never mind how competitive it was in the beginning. With a lot of these firms, the reports they produce, the analysis that's provided and the products never see the light of day for us as outsiders. It's really hard to know, call it out and then hopefully institute better practices to not contract with those firms again.
That's one thing. It's a big emphasis on better data and better disclosure of contract outputs. That would be a big one to help resolve some of these issues.
Another procurement reform that I'd like to see is looking at the size of contracts. This applies especially to software projects. I think in general, if you have smaller contracts, you're not as locked in and you can better keep firms to account. That would be another big one.
I think there should be more of an investigation and possibly rules introduced around the fluidity between senior leadership roles in the federal government and positions within these firms. It's pretty common, especially in the IT space, to see someone from a senior digital or IT role, especially in a CIO function, sashay into a second career at Deloitte or Accenture. That's a pretty common pattern that I've seen to the point that it almost becomes laughable. You're like, “Oh, there goes another one.”
What are they doing there? Obviously they're rallying their contacts. They understand how the processes work in government. On one level, there's nothing wrong with that. We should encourage more interchange between the private and public sectors. I'm not against that in principle, but there's something concerning to me as a citizen and as a researcher of public administration to see people with that kind of influence then being able to drum up this business.
The other thing that happens is the other way, where you'll get people from these firms seconded in to help lead a project in government, and they're given government email addresses and security clearances. Some of those are just practicalities. They need to be able to access the system and that's how we've set it up, but it's not obvious.
I've had a number of public servants tell me that sometimes they're sitting in a room developing a new service, launching some kind of transformation strategy or developing advice for the minister, and it's not always obvious who's a consultant and who's a public servant. I mean, we should be concerned about that, because public servants have as their mission creating public value. We also subject them to a lot of rules around values and ethics, bilingualism, loyalty to the Crown and all of these things.
A management consultant's job is to produce profit. We should know who they are when they're in the room with public servants. It should be really obvious that they have a different set of values and drivers, justifiably. Corporations are going to act as corporations. I don't think we want them to pretend to be public servants. That's another reform.
What would that look like in practice? We'd have to have some rules about how we second these people into government and balance that with the risk of making it so hard that you never see that fluid interchange, which we also want to avoid.