Public Accounts committee  Yes, of course.

Public Accounts committee  In the plan I mentioned in my remarks, we identified strengths and weaknesses, as you said, and it is because of those weaknesses that we decided to recruit employees for positions other than foreign service officer positions from now on: commercial officers, economic officers and so on.

Public Accounts committee  I think your question has to do with our locally engaged staff, if I understand correctly. When we hire locally engaged staff, we do so just as we do when we hire Canada-based staff. It's a competitive process. We put out ads, we interview, and so forth, and there is always, before we confirm the hire, what we call a reliability check done on locally engaged staff.

Public Accounts committee  First of all, regarding a human resources plan, I agree that ordinarily, government departments should have such a plan. We had a plan before, but it was not complex enough and not designed or drafted well enough to meet our current needs. The same is true of recruitment. For the past 50 years, we had a recruitment system in Canada.

Public Accounts committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. I will respond to that question. There are several points in there and I'll try to cover a couple of them. If I may, just before I get to the question you asked, you made the point that we're having trouble attracting people to the department, and that we can't recruit higher than our attrition rate.

Public Accounts committee  And of the department, not only the foreign service.

Public Accounts committee  I don't have the information in front of me, but I'd be prepared to provide it to the committee. It would take some research. I can give you a couple of examples. The one that springs to mind most readily is our ambassador to Afghanistan, Arif Lalani, who comes from a middle eastern background, is familiar with the region and so forth.

Public Accounts committee  We will.

Public Accounts committee  Yes, I do, Mr. Chairman. Thank you very much, and again, may I introduce Michael Small, who is accompanying me here today. He is the brand new assistant deputy minister of human resources as of April 1. I'm very pleased to have the opportunity to meet with you today to describe the steps we have taken in Foreign Affairs and International Trade over the past 11 months to implement our response to the Auditor General's review of human resources management in DFAIT.