Thank you, Mr. Chair. I am also concerned about this. Over the years, we have seen the centralization of some government services, and the results, from what I have heard, haven't been the greatest.
If you talk to anyone in the government who has ever tried to hire someone, they are not particularly thrilled with the way HR works, and from what I understand, there was a time when hiring was done sort of within the departments. Not entirely, but much more so. The departments seem happier with that, and it was generally quicker. The Department of Infrastructure has taken back control over procurement of all items over $50,000 and, from what I understand, departments now have difficulty procuring items. You know, we can't spend half the money that we allocate for procurement. Financial shared services has also been recently created, and it has been taken out of the departments and the people who directly use those into a central, you know, area in Finance, and now the people in the departments don't have a relationship with the Finance person anymore. Now it is just they contact Finance, and that person might not be very familiar with what goes on in their department, and I know that has caused issues in some departments.
Now, we are doing the same thing with these tech positions. So there are people right now who develop and design programs for use by departments, and they are working there on the front lines with the people who use those programs, and that creates a good feedback loop. If there are issues, they can talk directly to those people.
Now, there is going to be this gap between them and there is going to be the group of tech people and there is going to be the group of people on the front line, and they are not going to be dedicated to one project, and so they are not going to have that relationship. I foresee issues, and I don't know why this was done so soon after financial shared services and without an evaluation of how things are going in human resources and without an evaluation of how the departments like the new procurement services. Because, from everything I can tell, no one is really happy with it.
Even, you know, contractors. Before, if they had a contract with a department to procure something, they knew the people in that department. They could contact them. If there were problems with payments, they knew who to contact. Now, you contact Finance. It is some nameless person behind a desk somewhere in Yellowknife, and they have no idea what is going on with that person's project.
So I see a lot of problems with these sort of centralizations that have already happened, and yet we are going ahead with a new one. So the question is about what sort of measurements we are going to use to measure the success of this is almost moot because these measurements should have been done over the years on these other departments, and I don't think they have been.
I understand why there might be some need to reorganize. You know, you want to have people working together who are doing similar things, but I don't know if a massive organization all at once is the way to go about it. I remember one deputy minister said to me in the business plans, and it wasn't related to this, it was about something else, but no matter how you organize government, it is about communication. I see that now we are just organizing it, but we are not putting any thought toward communication. I have grave concerns about this, and I think this is ill-informed, and, you know, I don't know if I can support the budget on this alone, seeing what we have seen in the past with the other sorts of amalgamations. I just wanted to let the department. I don't really have a question. It was just a comment. Thank you, Mr. Chair.