David Ramsay

Thank you, Mr. Yakeleya. Mr. Minister.

Thank you, Mr. Minister. Mr. Villeneuve.

Thank you, Mr. Hawkins. I would hope so. Mr. Minister.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thanks for that explanation, Mr. Minister. The next question I have is in terms of vacant positions, and I’ll ask you about your department. When a position is vacant for four, six, eight months, whatever the case may be, that money being used, Mr. Chairman, to fund other functions or other activities inside the department such as travel or other contracted services or other expenses as they’re called, I’m just wondering, through you, Mr. Chairman, in FMBS when there’s vacant positions do they use the funded positions for other activities inside that department? Thank...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I guess another question I’d have is how are travel budgets arrived at in your department and in other departments? In the formula that I found consistent through the various departments was you take the number of employees and multiply it by $10,000 and then you arrive at a travel budget. Is that the case? Maybe the Minister can let me know how it is they arrive at a budget because I don’t think there is a budget. That’s what I’m getting at, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thanks to the Minister for answering that question. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. My comments are similar to the ones Ms. Lee had. We spoke about this when we went through this a few weeks back, but I will bring it up again in this setting. Can we ask the Minister to go department by department and provide this committee with some information on how many employees the government has in terms of HR function in each department, and what it costs this government and each department to deliver that function? I would like to get a handle on that in terms of what the numbers are and what it is costing the way we are operating today. I do agree that I...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, I move we report progress.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thanks for that explanation, Mr. Minister. I do have some difficulty though, especially given the fact that some of our larger government departments would have vacancy rates upwards of 10 percent. That being the case, we’re talking about some pretty significant dollars that are associated with those vacant positions. I do agree with you that, yes, departments and managers need to be able to have some flexibility and have to have some room to manoeuvre inside their departments, but if the money that is earmarked for positions isn’t spent on the positions I have some...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Yes, Mr. Minister, I am in receipt of that letter and the accompanying information that was with it. The question that I have though, in the information that you provided it just goes based on actual expenditures and not an actual budgeted amount. I know travel a lot of times is a difficult thing to gauge. Your needs might change over the course of the year and people might need to travel when they weren’t supposed to. I’m just wondering, what I was looking for was budgeted amounts, not actual expenditures. Working off of budgeted amounts it’s a lot easier to see the...