Mr. Tom Pulcine at the Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics Committee

On February 11th, 2009. See this statement in context.

February 11th, 2009 / 5:10 p.m.

Director General and Chief Financial Officer, Corporate Services Branch, Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada

I'll take a crack at the staffing aspect first. Lisa might want to add to the programs aspect.

In terms of the staffing, the numbers are indicated in the handout. The organization, in the supplementary estimates, requested an additional 18 FTEs, or people. That meant we wanted to grow the organization this year to be an organization of 158. In fact, our actual population has surpassed that. There's additional growth next year as well.

We were able to do some anticipatory staffing. In fact, to deal with issues like the backlog, we've hired more investigators and brought them on board sooner, recognizing that there will be natural turnover and we'll lose them.

So in terms of the staff, to answer that question, this year we wanted to get to 158 and we actually surpassed that target. I think that's extremely good news, and it's not the news we would have had six or eight months ago.

See context to find out what was said next.