I'd say a couple of things.
I would situate it within a wider program of public administration. The Department of National Defence and the Canadian Armed Forces have a range of very serious personnel issues right now, in terms of not only all the culture issues but also the massive quantitative problem they have right now, a huge recruiting and retention issue that needs urgent action. I would situate procurement within another kind of broader framework of public administration and implementation. We basically don't have a system that moves nearly as fast as we want it to and as fast we we've committed money. There's a range of different reasons for that, but I think systematically there hasn't been enough attention focused on calibrating the system to buy things as fast as we think we need them. There hasn't been a lot of improvement evident in that over the last 15 or 20 years.
I first started observing that the department was lapsing significant amounts of money on capital spending back in 2007-08. That went away for a very brief period of time a few years ago, but there is now another problem. As I was suggesting earlier, more money has been allocated under the new accounting rules that's over and above what gets thrown into the estimates, which still isn't going out the door.
There are various different ways that's manifested, from an accounting point of view, but the bottom line is we can't move money nearly as fast as we should. Given the current situation with inflation, that's becoming an increasingly severe problem. Defence inflation has always run 6% to 7% higher than inflation in the civil sector. Now that inflation in the civil sector is at a multidecade high, the Department of National Defence, I would imagine, is losing several tens of billions of dollars' worth of purchasing power with the various delays in purchasing things on time.