Government Operations committee  Yes, but it was not because of language issues. Rather, it was related to merit. Language is just one element in evaluating merit.

Government Operations committee  I should add that the system that allows us to determine the requirements of a position also allows us to determine whether or not requirements for a position are imperative or non-imperative.

Government Operations committee  It is due to the amount allocated for the entire computer system, for the first two years.

Government Operations committee  It is the computer system for the entire government. It is an amount earmarked for consultants and contracts. The other figures are estimates. The PSC will encounter the same difficulties as others do. Many senior employees will be retiring and new ones will be hired at lower lev

Government Operations committee  Okay, I'll start with your question on audit and what triggers an audit. We are setting up a system that I would like to see entirely risk-based and risk-driven, which does mean that we come forward with the problems. The idea behind our monitoring system and the monitoring of

Government Operations committee  It's part of the delegation agreement we have. We're saying these are the responsibilities to staff, this is how we expect you to run it, and these are the kinds of measures we expect you to monitor. We're looking at how many competitive processes you're running; we're looking

Government Operations committee  It's a very good question, and I worry about it, and that's because the system is in such transition, and I'm not quite clear what the end point is. On the audit side, I have to benchmark myself against the Auditor General, and I know I don't have the audit capacity I need to ha

Government Operations committee  My understanding is that it automatically gets referred to this committee.

Government Operations committee  Yes, I expect a package of reports to come that would be our annual report, which gives the concerns of the commission. Some of our concerns are obvious and already reflected in this committee—the state of readiness and the types of changes we have to make, concerns about non-par

Government Operations committee  Yes and no. Strictly, we're not responsible for compensation. But once we started looking at promotions and movement of people, we found that we have to look at classifications, which then leads you to compensation. Because some of the problems you're seeing in staffing are actua

Government Operations committee  No, that's the responsibility of the employer.

Government Operations committee  We would not look at that. But being one of those people who is compensated that way, I obviously have some interest. Most of the studies I have seen show that at entry into the public service in the more junior levels it's more than competitive, and often more generous than the

Government Operations committee  Yes, we are also responsible for the RCMP public complaints commission--they've changed their name, and I tend to confuse the name. We're responsible for them. We did an audit on them, and we were not very happy with their staffing practices either.

Government Operations committee  Are you talking about any one of the specifics, or are you talking in general?

Government Operations committee  What we're finding is that in those two cases we didn't find political influence. That's an important consideration here, which we didn't find. That's not to say it doesn't exist, but we didn't find it. What we found was a lot of hand-picking people and saying, “We're going to us