Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Definitely we see that as one of the benefits of procurement insured services is to increase the consistency for
how procurement is carried out across government, provide vendors with a uniform experience when they’re dealing with government, and get standardized response formats, submission formats. We see that as one of the benefits of the procurement insured services initiative. We have done a lot of work. We talked a little bit about, yesterday, some of the changes we made in the organization to prepare for that within Public Works and Services. We’re doing some of that background work now. As the Minister said, we intend to come forward through the business plan process with the work that we’ve been doing with the other departments across government on moving forward with procurement services.
In terms of the things we’re doing right now, we have developed a fairly strong system of courses we provide. Not just in Yellowknife, but we do travel to the regional centres and regional areas to provide training and procurement and how to go about using proper procedures, show some lessons learned where procurement has not gone as well as possible, use real life examples that we see from the work that we do in reviewing procurements. We also make ourselves available. Although our role is only to provide procurement to Public Works and Services, right now we offer that service and will provide technical support and assistance to any department that asks for help with an RFP process or guidance or even to complete the procurement on their behalf wherever possible. Obviously, we are sometimes limited by resources but we try very hard to not turn any requests away.