Sure.
I think the member raised earlier that during program review and the other major departmental reductions that started in 1989 as the federal government adjusted to the new fiscal situation in dealing with the deficit, a select group of those faced a disproportionate impact. Those were the most affected departments, or MADs. The significant take-away for the discussion today is that every one of the departments that plays a major role in defence acquisitions was part of that cohort that was most significantly reduced during the 1990s. As a result, at DND—that's the place where you can get the most relevant and easy metrics—they were reduced very significantly, with the good reason that the defence department was receiving less money, and less money for procurement. So the decision to downsize that aspect of the workforce at that time made sense.
What we're dealing with today, though, is a confluence of factors. There are fewer people, because that workforce was reduced and then it was never really increased, and it has actually been cut a little bit as part of the deficit reduction since 2011. The other key impact is that at that time, the way the packages for the public service and the military were apportioned out, they essentially incentivized people with a lot of experience close to retirement to leave and do other things.
So you have fewer people now, and the ones who are there don't have as much experience by virtue of where they are in their career path. You kind of have issues right now demographically where people who should be in middle management positions with a certain amount of experience didn't get that because they were brought in later.
The other impact of this is that at the same time over that period in the 1990s when we really didn't buy much in the way of big, complex procurements, people are now at a mid-career point never having had the experience of working on a big project. Had we not gone through that phase and that period, you'd have had a more even distribution of experience. I think we're very much dealing with an experience deficit, at least up until the early 2000s with the legacy of that period in the mid-nineties.
The big issue to look at going forward is how you actually address that capacity gap, and why departmentally it wasn't addressed more than it has been since the budget started going up in a significant way in 2005.