I can certainly explain it from my perspective. It would have been two or three years ago—Patricia would know the details of the timing—that the Prime Minister's advisory committee made a report suggesting that governance within the government on HR issues was overly complex. They made a recommendation in one of their annual reports to simplify it.
It is not an easy matter. You're dealing with six organizations and you want to make sure that any changes you make are on the right track. They did a thorough review of the organizations, made proposals as to changes that could be made, and as a result of those proposals—in March of last year, I believe it was—the machinery was changed to bring what was the Public Service Human Resources Management Agency of Canada together with the Treasury Board and to unify the function under a chief human resources officer.
It is not as if the functions weren't being fulfilled before. They were just being done in a different way. The view was that it was an overly complex arrangement that confused, in a sense, the roles of central agencies and made life more difficult for deputy ministers, who are really supposed to be able to manage their people in a commonsense, clear way.