Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to everyone.
The Auditor General mentioned in her report as well as in her opening statement about different areas that she found lacking. One of them was training when it comes to folks you're working with in the public sector. I have two pieces I'd like you to address about training. One of them is what I'll term—for a lack of better word—the “full-time general population” that's in the public service, and there is one other section. There are two subsets to that: folks we bring in on a temporary full-time basis, or contract, if you will; and in the subset of that are the consultants we bring in from time to time.
Really, we have three levels of employees, if you will, that clearly should be governed by ethical standards and by conflict of interest because they are working on behalf of the Government of Canada and of course Canadians.
Could you address each of those? Because clearly, in the report—in section 4.8 and section 4.9—we're talking about audits done in 2007, where indeed the Auditor General found contractors and consultants were empowered to set up contracts and terms of reference for contracts that eventually awarded the contracts to themselves or to the companies they were principals in, or less than principals in.
When I was in municipal government I used to abide by a conflict of interest code as well, and anyone who didn't understand that that's a direct conflict of interest is really eating the wrong mushroom, so to speak, because at the end of the day, if you don't know you have a pecuniary interest in a company, and you're working for the government, and you award your company the contract or set up the terms of reference such that the contract will be won by that company.... That's not long ago. We're talking three years ago when the audit was done; it's not 25 years ago. This is relatively new.
So could you address those three groups of employees, with a sense of how you intend to train them? It's all wonderful to say that full-time employees go to school, but the reality of going to school and actually working in the real world is not totally the one and the same.