National Defence committee  A long time ago, yes they did.

National Defence committee  That's a complicated question. I could say it's as a telephone chat goes on: When somebody starts doing something and it becomes acceptable, then others start doing it. Again, I would think that the hiring practices and the change that left it under the Public Service Employment

National Defence committee  Of course there is, but start paying them the market rate: Start recognizing them for their professional services and treat them as professionals. Why they're going to Calian.... I just talked about the pandemic and a government that had frontline workers and was refusing to pay

National Defence committee  The processes that he might be referring to is the newest guideline from Treasury Board on contracting services. I've been very clear about our position on that. It looks like it's a gauntlet for somebody to get through before they can actually contract out. It doesn't put any ov

National Defence committee  May I add something to that because I think it's very important for this committee to know? There are procedures for the department where they can convert an operational maintenance budget into a salary/wage envelope, but they just do not do it. They do not make the mechanisms a

National Defence committee  I haven't looked into the numbers. When you say augmentation in the public service, I do think that it's mostly at the executive level. It's at the higher levels; it's not at the working levels. That's where we're still seeing a reliance on contracting out to perform that work, b

National Defence committee  DND and most federal departments have not invested in human resources, so you are leaving hiring up to engineers or IT workers, people who are already overworked, to rely on the staffing mechanisms. We need to make sure that we make it easier to hire faster and more efficiently,

National Defence committee  Thank you for mentioning DRDC—the research arm—because something is happening that is very concerning to our members. We represent the research scientists. The government has started to rely on grants to do defence research. They're taking those dollars away from our research sc

National Defence committee  Again, it's very complex, but you have to look at how easy it is to hire somebody. I would ask that this committee think about talking to DCC or NETE and asking them how they hire their people. What happens is, they know somebody. Somebody is brought in under a NETE contract to

National Defence committee  I don't have any knowledge of them right now. We can certainly look into them, especially because they say they're for professional services. That is something that we have always looked at from a contracting-out perspective. That is where they engage in engineering services or I

National Defence committee  No.

National Defence committee  From a transparency perspective, of course we want to make sure we're getting value for taxpayer money. We would have to take a look at them. But GC Strategies and McKinsey aren't really big on our radar. We have other really big players, like Calian and Telus and some others, th

National Defence committee  For those on the committee, like I said, the Professional Institute has been looking at outsourcing for a long time, for over a decade. I will be honoured to present those reports. I don't have any others. We will be looking at doing a concentrated survey with the Department of

National Defence committee  I'm sorry. You have the bells sounding.

National Defence committee  Okay.