As I mentioned, one of the challenges we have is finding qualified people to work in the access to information area. And as I said, it's not something that's unique to Environment Canada. We experienced quite a dip in our staffing levels in the 2008-09 year, which is being looked at here. We have difficulty both attracting and retaining these kinds of people; there's a shortage of them, if you like.
We've instituted this development program to help us train qualified people, but while that's building up, rather than have the backlog continue to grow, we have used consultants to supplement for the people we can't hire, if I can put it that way, to help us deal with the backlog.
Our hope is that over the coming months and years--we'll see how long it takes--we'll have full staffing, either with people we've been able to attract to the department or with people we've built up through this program.
We have to get on top of this backlog, and we felt this was the only way we could do it in the near term.