Thank you, Mr. Massé.
I'll provide you with some context. When I joined the board in 2007, we had around 400 employees, and we were spending in the neighbourhood of $400 million on contract management, on behalf of the Department of National Defence, or DND.
We eventually peaked at nearly $1.2 billion with a staff of more than a thousand employees.
How many employees we have and where in the country they are located depends on what DND plans to spend on infrastructure. The large-scale work we were doing in Trenton meant that we needed a good many employees on site. That is the case whether the work is being carried out in Valcartier, Gagetown, or Esquimalt: when we conduct a major project, we hire people locally.
The variations also depend on the government's agenda. When projects were added to DND's infrastructure program in 2014-15, we received $450 million in additional funding and we had to hire people quickly to use that money.