It is indeed a challenge.
In a past life, I remember working on the relationship between in-house consultants and external consultants. I think we need to find a balance between the two. If you eliminate one of them, you're going to run into trouble. If there are no consultants, what I call internal consultants, whose status may be more or less clear, then there are no people whose expertise enables the government to avoid dependence on the private sector.
In the past, for example in Quebec, the issue came down to infrastructure and transportation. The ministry of transportation was stripped of its engineers. I can tell you that the private sector took full advantage of this, and it led to some serious missteps. It's not a good idea.
That said, I'm not as knowledgeable—you can tell by the colour of my hair—about what comes next, but I can tell you one thing: with everything we're doing right now with digitization and all that it entails, can we really afford not to have any strong in-house expertise in this area?
Let's look at what's happening in Quebec right now, what happened with the Société de l’assurance automobile du Québec, and everything that seems to be happening in the health care sector. We're dealing with multinational corporations that are calling the shots. How can we control that? I think there's room for both, and we need to combine the two areas of expertise.