I think you ask a really interesting question, and I don't think I have a complete answer. I'm not sure if anybody does. First of all, it's important to recognize that we respond to demands for service. So we were getting bigger--we're not now--in response to increased demand from the departments that run programs that were suddenly attracting many legal issues. The classic example, I suppose, would be at the Department of Indian Affairs during the period when there were 13,000 or 15,000 cases coming out of the Indian residential schools. That created a bubble of work, an enormous amount of work, both from INAC and the Department of Justice, as they tried to deal fairly and expeditiously with those cases.
We've seen the whole phenomenon of class actions growing in recent times, which is a factor that affects society as a whole. We had only a handful some years ago. They were virtually unknown. And now we have 150 class actions, I believe, against the federal government. By their nature, they are very time-consuming.
We have a number of public inquiries, which you would know about very well. Public inquiries have a way of demanding a great deal of attention from the Department of Justice.
But the Auditor General makes a point, which I think we really have to understand well and try to think through, which is whether we can design incentives for the departments that give us the work or ask for our services to help them, together, find ways to control the demand. I don't create the demand. They do. Can I help them find an incentive mechanism that will hold this down?