Culture change, as you know, is one of the hardest things to bring about. I think the first thing would have to be a government-wide statement that we're expecting public servants to consider effectiveness as well as rules-based approaches to things. We would have to find a few clear cases of somebody who made a mistake and wasn't taken behind the barn.
A lot of it is behavioural over the course of a short period of time. I don't think it's going to happen very quickly, but today part of it would be that you cannot jump on every single little problem that arises in defence procurement as if the government deserves to be defeated. I'm not directing this at you because you're the opposition today. It's the same if this side of the room were in the opposition, and that's effectively what happens. I understand there's an opposition, and that's what it's meant to do—oppose—but somehow we need to find a way to raise the threshold of disapproval when something goes wrong. I think people should have to be able to justify when they take risks or they violate a rule, and sometimes you can do it very effectively.
One of the things I used to argue to my colleagues when I was in defence was that, if you're being asked to do something that strikes you as being nonsensical, ask for an exemption. If I can't give it to you, I'll ask the minister. In very many cases it's not a big deal. It's not violating human rights—to your point. It's just some rule that somebody set up 15 years ago and that we've never changed. As in most areas of government, you establish a rule and then you add to it over the decades. Just a systematic review of the rules, to that point, might not be a bad thing, because you have Treasury Board, public services, the Privy Council Office and ISED all adding rules to defence procurement. They don't withdraw very many, but they do tend to add them over the years.