Bob McLeod

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I can speculate — because I wasn’t there. As the Member may be aware…. I think he was he was around when the Department of Personnel was blown up and the people from the department were hired off to the different departments. Their budgets were reduced by 25 per cent and the departments were told, “Well, you guys can be more efficient, so you don’t need as much money.” It came back to haunt the formation of the Department of HR, because none of the departments were willing to give any more than they had received from the centre. As such, with the amount of resources...

I wouldn't say it was quality assurance that did that. But the HR department did work with senior management of different departments so we could identify potentially affected employees.

We had targets, and we asked the management to identify the positions. We were working under the direction that we were to minimize person-year reductions as much as possible. So we decided we would use vacant positions to fill our reductions for the Department of HR.

Right now, as of March 31, the department had 153 indeterminate employees, nine term employees and 19 casual employees for a total of 180 employees. We’ve hired casuals to help us address a number of long-term problems for the department. Specifically, we’ve formed a backlog team to work on reducing the backlog within the department and also to fill in for employees who are on various forms of leave, be it maternity, paternity or otherwise.

Mr. Chair, I think it's important for the Member to recognize that the responsibility for management and dealing with human resources is held jointly with the departmental senior managers. The departments have been delegated authority to do all of the hiring and staffing, and the Department of HR provides services to departments. So, as such, the departments have authority to make those kinds of decisions, and we provide services and facilitate the human resource functions.

Certainly we have a number of different approaches we would like to take. What we are starting to realize is that it’s becoming harder and harder for us to staff HR positions with people with HR backgrounds. We are finding we have to spend more time in training. We want to focus more on working with the departments that have the delegated authority to hire. So we want to work more closely with them so we provide better service levels. We had to pull some services that were done at the regions into headquarters in order to deal with some processing problems or issues. We want to spend more time...

We have the Staff Retention Policy. The whole reason for having that is to try to keep affected employees with the government, and the Affirmative Action Policy applies to that as well. So we’ll take every step to try to keep those employees and reassign them.

That’s correct, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Chair, we provide human resource services out of all of the offices. Some may not provide as many services as others, depending on the location. Generally, the larger regional centres are full service, but the smaller ones may not be as full service.

The discussion’s in Cabinet.