Mr. Chair, when I mentioned machinery, I was referring to how the government organizes itself. Should it leave the responsibility of awarding contracts to Public Works and Government Services, or should it create another agency? That it what I meant by machinery.
However, regardless of how the government organizes itself, we audit the process to see if it is too long, and if it is fair and transparent. There are principles. We maintain that the process must be open, transparent and fair.
We will examine whether those goals have been attained. If a contract is sole-sourced, we will look into the reasoning, to see whether it is legitimate and whether that decision can really be justified.
However, as I mentioned earlier, I am not really sure that we can audit the specifications. Military personnel spend hours and hours on them. We see the procedure they followed to determine the specifications, if there is an underlying foundation, but since we are not experts, we cannot call that into question.