Thank you for your question.
The money we're speaking about here in terms of severance is not related to departures. As the chief financial officer for the Treasury Board Secretariat said in her opening remarks, this relates to the elimination of accumulation of severance for voluntary departures.
What we're speaking about here is...if you go back under the existing collective agreements, employees accumulated severance benefits that they earned and then were eligible to receive when they retired or departed voluntarily. That practice of accumulating those benefits is now stopping.
What we do have is a benefit that the employees have earned up to this point under their existing or old collective agreements. The total liability for that amount the employees have earned up until about March 2011 is roughly $6 billion, and that's already on the books as a liability. When you look at the $850 million that's being requested for severance, and you would have seen a similar amount—slightly higher last year—of $1.3 billion, if I recall correctly, that is an estimate of the cash that will be paid out to employees who no longer accumulate that severance but do have the right to receive the payment for the benefits they've earned.
As that severance benefit ceases to be accumulated—new agreements are negotiated—employees are given a choice. They can take the cash for the severance benefits they've earned up to date now or they can defer it until they leave. There's also an option to have some now and some later, but let's keep it simple for today's purposes.
What we're trying to do this year, again, is estimate how much cash will be paid out for that earned benefit. Last year we asked for $1.3 billion, based on our estimate, and our estimate was about 75% of those employees who were eligible would ask for a cash-out. In fact, the estimate was not too bad. It was roughly 73%, $1.1. billion, so we were not too far off in our estimate. This year we're estimating that we will need $850 million for the same reason.
That number will vary depending upon two things, one being the number of agreements that get negotiated. It was mentioned in the opening remarks that there are now...I believe it was nine agreements that have been successfully negotiated where the benefit has been eliminated and there is no longer accumulation of severance. There are some 27 agreements that the Treasury Board is actually responsible for. New agreements will be negotiated. Depending upon the pace of those negotiations, how quickly the payment options are put in place and the choices the employees make, we then are left with an amount we have to estimate. It is an estimate, and at the current moment it's an estimate of $850 million. It has nothing to do with the departures you were asking about.