Thank you.
The focus of our project is really on supporting civil service reform, so this is very much to your point with regard to corruption or anti-corruption.
The bottom line for Ukraine is they need a professional public service that works, that is not corrupt, and that can accomplish the things the government needs to do. Our focus has in fact been on helping them at a policy level to articulate both a policy and a legal framework for the professionalization of the public service, because as I'm sure you're more than well aware from your time spent in Ukraine, at the moment Ukraine does not have a professional public service. There is no formal separation between political and administrative. So our partner, the beneficiary of this particular project, the main department of the civil service, has spent the last five years undertaking a country-wide campaign to shore up support for that professionalization of the civil service. So Canada is making a very important contribution in helping them to articulate that vision and to already think at a very operational level about how the Ukrainian public service will eventually become professional and become a public service that would operate free of political influence.
One of the very significant contributions worth noting in that vein is the role the Public Service Commission of Canada has played. I know we had mentioned it previously, and there were questions from other members with respect to the Public Service Commission. They in many respects have had a very interesting role, in that they have helped our Ukrainian partner to think about how in the future, when there is a law adopted on the civil service to formally separate administrative and political, they're in fact going to monitor that the public service remains politically neutral and free of any kind of political influence. And the Public Service Commission model is one that is being explored in the Ukrainian context.
Most likely there will be a hybrid at some point, but the Public Service Commission, through the president and her staff, has been very instrumental in facilitating a public policy dialogue around what that in fact could look like in the future. And that's a very important contribution that Canada is making in this area.