Government Operations committee  I do. Thank you, Mr. Chair. As the chair indicated, my name is Kathleen Owens. I'm the assistant comptroller general for assets and acquired services at the Treasury Board Secretariat. My colleague, Mark Schizkoske, is the director of procurement policy. It's certainly a pleasu

Government Operations committee  That's a good question. In terms of contracting policy, what we're trying to do is have the right balance between what's operational and what's a principle-based policy. Right now, as I said, we have a very detailed policy that is probably down into the weeds a bit more, which i

Government Operations committee  Obviously what we do with any legislation is see if adjustments need to be made to policy once the legislation is passed. In addition to policy, sometimes there's additional guidance that we need to provide to departments. Again, that assessment hasn't been done yet. We'll be mon

Government Operations committee  Recently, we recently made a change to the financial management policy that ensures the government can pay its invoices in 30 days or less. The previous requirement in the policy was to wait 30 days, but now departments can pay in advance.

Government Operations committee  I think we can say that the policy work is under way in looking at options. No decisions have been made yet.

Government Operations committee  I think we're going to come back to you with ESDC's timelines for this. They are the lead.

Government Operations committee  I think it's very true when reading contracts that some of them can be very opaque, and there is a real legal industry around contracts. I think that's very true. From a Treasury Board perspective, terms and conditions in contracts are only relevant to the government contract r

Government Operations committee  I agree. I have no knowledge of how those are connected.

Government Operations committee  I'll speak first and give the Treasury Board's perspective. As I indicated in my opening remarks, one of the key things we're doing is looking at the rules. Those rules, from a TB contracting policy perspective, are focused on departments, but maybe a lot of those rules don't n

Government Operations committee  Absolutely.

Government Operations committee  We did a version of the new policy that we consulted with departments on and that reduced the contracting policy from 300 pages to 30. There was a significant reduction in a lot of the duplication and verbiage in the existing policy. The second thing I want to mention is around

Government Operations committee  In the procurement community, are we recruiting the right people with the right skill set?

Government Operations committee  In the policy process, or in the—

Government Operations committee  At this stage—

Government Operations committee  This is the next stage. We have feedback from within the federal family, those departments that actually do the procuring, and then we'll have to reach out to suppliers and other people to see if it makes sense.