Thanks very much, Mr. Chair.
To your first comment about the observation that often government departments can seem to be siloed, disconnected from each other, I think that can be the case. Our accountability to Parliament is quite separate.
But we do meet with colleagues. As one example, I chair a group of assistant deputy ministers who come from a number of other departments, small and large. We talk through issues of procurement, including in that discussion our best practices. So we do have some avenues--and through the Treasury Board Secretariat as well, committee work--where we have an opportunity to share best practices. So we're not completely isolated from one another.
In terms of the challenge--especially given employee turnover--of how you ensure a very high standard in ensuring fair, open, and transparent awarding of contracts and contract administration, I would point to, in our case, the creation of this framework, something that's logical and systematic, and something that, as an important component, has the guidance for individual employees who are involved in awarding contracts or administering them.
To my earlier point, we are ambitious in the use of our tax dollars, whether for getting the goods and services we need to run programs or whether for greening or SME involvement. Yet we really need to focus on ensuring that the way the contracts are awarded is fair, open, and transparent.
I will speak to our contracting officers and the process they go through to ensure that fairness is there. They are assiduous about ensuring that opportunities are publicly posted, in our case on the MERX system. They are assiduous about ensuring we have evaluation committees for defining the criteria that will determine who wins a contract and that the people chosen to participate on committees have no conflicts of interest. That's precious to us.
We need to make sure that each bidder is treated fairly, in the sense that we can't be giving privileged information to any one bidder. They're very careful about that. Any unsuccessful bidder is given the right to a debriefing after the award to ensure they understand the reasons they did not win. They're not given such a briefing before the evaluation is done, of course, because that might allow for bid repair. We have a highly professional and well-trained staff who ensure the rigour is done.
And then, of course, we have the posting of awards of contracts, according to the proactive disclosure policy of the Treasury Board Secretariat. All of that is transparent as well. There is a lot of rigour in place to ensure fairness, openness, and transparency.