Government Operations committee  There is no pro bono work.

Government Operations committee  Thank you for that question. Certainly, we carefully monitor the situation and the allegations and activities that the member has mentioned. As the minister noted, these activities have not triggered our integrity regime, in the sense that there have been no criminal convictions of an affiliate, which would be the trigger for our integrity—

Government Operations committee  Absolutely. Thank you for that question. As the minister noted in her remarks, we have a national master—

Government Operations committee  We established that instrument. It's a national master standing offer for benchmarking services. We have four similar arrangements with other companies. These arrangements contain proprietary information. Each one of these companies has a service that involves proprietary methods, tools and analytical models, and they are used to compare an organization within the Government of Canada to a peer organization, a comparable organization in the private sector or in another country or order of government.

Government Operations committee  That's exactly right. These businesses, McKinsey and others, conduct surveys and the data they collect are their property. It's these datasets that are used to do the analysis and comparisons between government operations and those of other entities.

Government Operations committee  In this case, it's partly about the expertise, but it's mostly about the data that these companies have from previous surveys that they have at their disposal to do the comparisons. We don't own datasets like that, datasets that would show productivity and levels of cost structure of different organizations around the world.

Government Operations committee  I'm not aware of any such case.

Government Operations committee  Thank you, Minister. The project really was looking at the human resources side of the pay centre. It was looking at how we train our staff, how we onboard them onto the team, how we deploy the staff and how we look at the work and different levels of complexity and assign staff to those different types of work.

Government Operations committee  That was a new project that was introduced, and it's completing almost as we speak. That contract expires at the end of March, and all the recommendations that came out of that analysis have been implemented.

Government Operations committee  As Ms. Royds indicated earlier, there are different levels of delegation for the approvals. Depending on the value, it would be done by different levels of officials. Some of them—

Government Operations committee  —would be done at the ministerial level, and some have to go to Treasury Board for approval. There are different levels of authority.

Government Operations committee  I'd like to add a clarification. McKinsey provides services to government departments. All of our team members and I regularly work with the team contracted to provide consulting services regarding payroll administration. So we have a relationship under that contract.

Government Operations committee  All relationships fall within the structure of the contract. So communication is limited to the aspects of work that are described in the contract. That is how it's structured.

Government Operations committee  As far as I know, email addresses that end in “gc.ca” are for public servants, and those of employees of outside firms are their own responsibility.

Government Operations committee  Thank you for the question. To clarify, are you asking in how many contracts PSPC was the client department and user of the services?