It's good idea; it's important. It can be hard to do, which is why, although people have been trying for many years, there isn't as much of it as there ought to be.
It's hard to do in several different ways. First of all, there's the money problem. If you get somebody who's the chief financial officer of the Bank of Nova Scotia and invite them to come to work in Ottawa for $170,000 a year, you probably won't get many takers. On the other hand, are you going to bring someone in for $700,000, when the chief financial officer in the department next door is making $170,000?
Those are the kinds of problems. But it's too bad those exist, because I think the public service benefits all the time, if you can compare notes with somebody from another big organization and ask, how did you do it, how did you cope with a situation like this? You should be able to learn from them, and they might learn some things that they can take back to the private sector as well.
There is another feature. I was once asked to do a study about the problems of bringing people into the public service from outside, because the people involved were concerned that the failure rate was so high. And it is very high, particularly at the most senior levels, not with lawyers and not with financial officers. If you bring someone in as a deputy minister who's been the executive vice-president of a private sector corporation, to some extent it's like landing on the moon. Those of us who live in this city don't realize how complicated government is in many ways. Members of Parliament certainly know.