Among things we have done to date in the kind of strategy we've followed, one is that there obviously has to be a lot of information, so we did a lot of work initially to provide information on availability of people and on how to apply, and in working with groups to encourage them to apply. I think we see some of the results of that in the volume of applications: we have the people applying, which may not have been the case in the past. But we did a lot of work on it.
On the executive side, under the old legislation, where we were making the appointments, we looked at the representativeness in each department and challenged departments on why they were not considering targeting some of these positions specifically to members of visible minorities to try to get the numbers up. The decision was finally always in the hands of the managers about that kind of targeting.
As Linda was saying, we developed a pre-qualified pool of EX-1s for entry into the public service, who we tested. We advertised, we tested, and they're executive-ready. We are encouraging departments to make use of this pre-qualified pool, because certainly you can reduce your time to staff when you have a pool of people to draw from. So we're doing that.
Your question about going forward is about what it is we do because the world now has changed. I'm going to be looking a lot to that study to pinpoint for us where the problems are, because I think our strategy has to be developed in this area. We will continue to be very active on that file. We take every opportunity we can to discuss it. We report regularly on where the numbers are. We make it one of the things we always talk about that people have to take into account.
But in terms of specific things, I need to be a little more informed about what the problem is, because I think we have them now coming in. We just have to worry about what level it has reached, and what it is about the process that is taking them out, and what it is you can and should do to try to keep more of them in the process.
Having said that, we still expect appointments to be merit-based and non-partisan.