Information & Ethics committee  The line has flattened, if I can put it that way. Issues of the day can cause it to go back up. It seems to have flattened. We have that under some control. Our early resolution process is starting to show real benefits, but we have no control over what comes in the door and what

Information & Ethics committee  That's the only split we didn't come with. It's 70%--it's down to 64% with the reductions--for what you would call operations, which would include management.

Information & Ethics committee  No. The costing of this submission in the A-base review is based on the existing statute, the existing mandate. We did have a discussion with Treasury Board at one point about mandate creep on some of the issues, but we resolved those. No, it is based on the statute as it sits.

Information & Ethics committee  No, we didn't do the A-base study, but in terms of the impact of the legislative amendment proposals that I've made, we've looked at them as low, high, medium, and for the education mandate we came out with high in terms of the cost, the base increase, if you like, to our budget,

Information & Ethics committee  That's correct. The budget was not cut, and we asked for additional funding. We got less than we requested after going through the Treasury Board Secretariat process and the advisory panel.

Information & Ethics committee  If we do not get these supplementary estimates, the original budget will go into position and be minus five investigators. But that's not a cut from this year. That was a sunset provision put on those when granted in 2005-06.

Information & Ethics committee  Your annual voted amount is your A-base. Every year you re-challenge it. It's kind of like going to zero budget. Normally, going forward, you should be able to defend A-base. Anything above that has to be justified. We had not gone through one in the OIC for several years, but cy

Information & Ethics committee  I can't speak for other organizations. I can tell you that if it were part of a larger fiscal restraint measure such as 5% off the top for everybody, or targeted elements such as travel across the organization, I'd have fewer issues with it. But no, it's a specific component that

Information & Ethics committee  As I said to my colleague, it's hard for us to go to Sparks Street and bleed right now, because we got 24 FTEs out of 30. Those will considerably enhance our program delivery. The fact that systemic issues were treated in the fashion they were causes me concern. I'm willing to

Information & Ethics committee  That was the main objective of the comprehensive review we conducted. The review forms the basis of this submission. For example, in the past, we expected investigators to be able to handle about 45 files per year. Now we are looking at an efficiency rate that will increase that

Information & Ethics committee  For investigations of specific, individual complaints, I am reasonably hopeful that we will have the necessary resources to make sure that, not only do we process them better, but also, to some extent, the clients' satisfaction level is acceptable. We are reluctant to set deadlin

Information & Ethics committee  Mr. Chair, I am not sure I understood the question. Are you asking whether it would be preferable to use contractors rather than permanent staff for our work?

Information & Ethics committee  We are. We had no other choice but to use contracting as a way to deal with the backlog. But our human resources strategy was to eliminate contracting and to train qualified staff, especially in legal matters. In the longer term, that staff will be a better resource for the gove

Information & Ethics committee  It's a business model that we developed in-house, but with the assistance, as I said, of IBM as the A-base review consultant. It was the platform, if you like, on which we based our submission to Treasury Board. I can say that in terms of the Treasury Board Secretariat performi

Information & Ethics committee  Mr. Chair, clearly, ever since we started receiving a large number of complaints about our backlog, the complaint from our clients—if you will—is that the office took far too much time to complete its investigations. That was especially the case with administrative complaints. As