National Defence committee  Sure. As an example, there are many different what's called “capability sponsors” for projects. Across the army, the navy, the air force and the infrastructure folks at National Defence, we don't systematically look at which projects do better or worse. Are there some that are b

National Defence committee  I come back to a comment I made earlier. The production of data on the part of the public service of Canada, I would say, is not a great strength writ large. One thing you could do is ask for yearly reports on a more systematic basis. Come back with information year over year.

National Defence committee  I would just point out that from the time Alan was there to now, the level of staff in the last organization you worked at in the materiel group is only about 350 people larger than it was when he was there. I think when he was there, we were trying to spend about $2 billion a ye

National Defence committee  I think something set up in PCO would offer the opportunity to try to get a sense across government of where the issues are, to coordinate them better and align them with government priorities, coming back to whether this does or does not matter. If this is government's 84th prio

National Defence committee  It's hard to point to any individual project, because we don't report on this data, just to drive that point home, but the majority of projects are behind schedule. I think it's fairly widely attributed. One other thing I'd look for is that I think that dynamic.... It's not jus

National Defence committee  Well, they're the ones that Alan mentioned. Shipbuilding is behind schedule. Fighter jets are behind schedule. The ground-based air defence.... I could use the rest of the 20 minutes.

National Defence committee  The department contracts for services for a whole bunch of things that it doesn't have either capacity or specialized skill sets to do, like people to provide engineering support and additional basic staff support to work on projects. One thing to reflect on, and I've pointed thi

National Defence committee  I would say that the lack of data makes it hard to provide a really meaningful comparison because you have there very idiosyncratic national approaches, so it's hard to look at different systems and identify what parts of the processes are most similar to be able to provide some

National Defence committee  I think you can look at lots of different examples of things where we could potentially see benefits of particular parts of the process, but I think the starting point for that should be, to my mind, what's not working here other than everything is slower, but that's a pretty gen

National Defence committee  My answer would be yes, it's the same general issue. Actually, with procurement, it's in some ways simpler, because despite the fact that the forces are dramatically under strength, there are tens of thousands of troops. There are only a couple of hundred big procurement projects

National Defence committee  I have a different perspective. I'd just say it seems like it's more important that this matters to the Prime Minister. If it does, that flows through into the direction given to the bureaucracy reporting to him or her and the Privy Council Office —just to go back to Ms. Gallan

National Defence committee  I would just say, quickly, that I think there needs to be much more focus on actually implementing those policies. They don't change hugely. There's very little follow-through on the actual implementation of them. There's not enough attention to detail when new policies are being

National Defence committee  I think we're underutilizing our own defence industrial base. I go back to my comments earlier that we don't have enough production capacity across NATO to meet the demands of Ukraine and re-equip ourselves as well as our allies. Ammunition in particular is an area where there se

National Defence committee  To keep going with the metaphor about accountability and children taking out the trash, if you don't hold your kids accountable for anything, it doesn't matter whether you have one of them or a lot. I think accountability is a problem more broadly. There are lots of instances in

National Defence committee  I'll just emphasize a point Alan made. One of the issues in the defence procurement strategy about a decade ago was transferring contracting authority from PSPC to DND, up to a $5-million threshold. I don't know whether anyone has ever collected evidence to show whether or not