Government Operations committee  The relationship contractually is with the company. We maintain that relation, but the relation on the resources is maintained with the company.

Government Operations committee  Mr. Chair, I would like to start by making a distinguishment between subcontracts and the professional services firm. In most cases, these were professional IT services firms. The subcontracts in this case are—

Government Operations committee  I'll start over. I would like to distinguish between a case with a subcontractor and a professional services firm. These were professional services firms that we are talking about, subcontractor resources who are essentially employees. Therefore, the information that we have is personal information around the employees that JDC Strategies and other companies engaged to provide the IT resources for the project.

Government Operations committee  Not to my knowledge. There would be nothing that we would put in place by ourselves, for ourselves. We would only put in place—

Government Operations committee  Actually, there would be a combination of...they're called “task authorizations”. In some cases, the task authorization will be in a dollar value, where the departments themselves would issue the task authorizations, but above their delegated authorities, we would actually issue the task authorization.

Government Operations committee  Good morning, Mr. Chair and members. Thank you for inviting us to speak today about how PSPC can support the Canada Border Services Agency and the Public Health Agency in meeting their needs. I would draw attention to the fact that we, as a common service provider, are really trying to make available the most agile and effective instruments to serve the needs of our clients and help them deliver their departmental needs.

Government Operations committee  One of the things that we're really trying to work on with our broader client base of departments is to have a better forecasting of what their procurement opportunities are in the future for the next two to three years and see where those are geographically located. From that, we would be able to look at some of our strategies.

Government Operations committee  One of the things that we are really trying to figure out, from a procurement modernization perspective, is where we're over-expending effort internally and demanding external purchase, so we're looking at smaller dollar-value contracts in which maybe we can use even more informal processes.

Government Operations committee  Thank you for the question. Within the current policy, they are not one of the under-represented groups, so they'd be in the—

Government Operations committee  Since probably the late 1990s, we've had the procurement strategy for aboriginal business, and now it's the procurement strategy for indigenous business. Under those programs, we did make efforts to actually have businesses identify as indigenous within our supplier registration, and we've been keeping that data for a number of years.

Government Operations committee  Mr. Chair, when we look at the privacy issue, we have to look at it through a number of lenses, one of which is businesses voluntarily registering in a system with an acknowledgement of what their data would be used for and agreeing to submitting their data, versus holding data within a system that we're building and having new systems, versus the questions and the information we might ask for when we run a procurement process and hold that data.

Government Operations committee  Thank you for the question. As to the first one, you are correct that for businesses not owned by first nations and not on reserve, it is not a legal impediment to them as long as they have assets off reserve.

Government Operations committee  We are actually running a pilot right now for a smaller construction procurement for which we did not require this. It is actually a Treasury Board policy for us to have security, so there would need to be some policy changes to make it more permanent. I would also note that there are other stakeholders who have an interest in this issue.

Government Operations committee  —so they're—

Government Operations committee  I can't speak to Treasury Board in terms of how easy it will be to change that policy. We would have to work with them.