It has been remarkable to be able to go between the private and public sectors. I hope every executive takes the opportunity to do this. I think it would make for a different discussion between government and the private sector. I think we need to send government folks out into industry. I think it's a very rich experience. The U.S. likely does a better job of that than we do.
The big similarity is that the people are completely committed. The people I get to work with and support every day in tech in government are awesome. They work very hard. The specialness drives the complexity.
To very directly answer your question, why do we need 33 different HR systems? Recruitment is recruitment and development is development. That is consistent. Certainly, we have collective agreements that are different. I am not dismissing that. But in terms of the basics of HR, we have not had the discipline to get to a common approach to HR, regardless of the collective agreement complexities.
The biggest difference I would note—I ran into this at Enbridge and at Air Canada—is that there is a severity of consequence if you do not standardize in the private sector that does not exist in government. What I mean by that is that getting into an enterprise approach, when that is what has been decided by the board and the CEO, there is only one consequence if you choose not to get on board with that plan. It's a meritocracy in a way that's a little bit different from what I've experienced.
Now, the consensus-based, collegial-based complexity of government lends itself to having a bit of a different discussion around things, but I think there is room for improvement there to perhaps have a little bit more of that “edgeness”, for lack of a better word, for not complying with enterprise. That includes both public service...but as we actually build and make government policy as well.