I think the time is right—maybe after the next election, not in the last year of a Parliament—for a structural change to the public service. I think that we have made a lot of progress under successive governments on openness and transparency, opening government up to Canadians. These are decisions built up over the years with a lot of pressure from this committee and from others.
This is the bucket I would call glasnost, openness. All grants and contributions are on the Internet. All contracts are on the Internet. All travel and hospitality are on the Internet. Every single performance and measure used by every department is on the Internet. We've moved forward in strengthening the role of the parliamentary budget office and the chief information officer. We've strengthened the role of the chief statistician. This government has worked hard on open government, although it was something that Minister Clement pursued in the previous government, which is why we're ranked number two on open government in the world. We have something called GC InfoBase, which makes all kinds of data available to you and to other Canadians, which is just getting better and better, and so on. We have made some movement on cabinet confidences, access, and those sorts of things.
I think in opening government, we've made an enormous amount of progress, but the basic structures of government are those of the 1980s, and so we have to look at layers; we have to look at occupational groups and categories and how work is organized. That is not going to be an easy task. It's largely a matter of collective bargaining, and it's not going to be easy to change, but I do think it would be worth it. I don't expect to be around to see the end of that process, but I do encourage you to take a serious look at it.