It was created a number of years ago to provide a space where public servants can talk about public policy trends, look at the future, bring people from other levels of government and other countries together to have discussions on things like, let's say, aging of the population, equality, diversity--big social trends, as well as some economic, even issues of water management. That then produced conferences, reports. There's a quarterly publication that's produced by the organization.
It was felt that PCO needed to be there at the beginning of the initiative a few years ago because we felt we had lost some of our capacity in terms of policy development, especially the longer-term prospective policy development. We nurtured it for a number of years and then we felt that it was no longer really a core responsibility for PCO. We've now asked the HRSD department to take it over. We've also created a board of deputy ministers to be the advisers in terms of guiding the organization into its future.
So that describes it. There were about 35 or 40 employees involved in that transfer.
The transfer to the Treasury Board Secretariat relates to the government regulations secretariat. Basically, a few years ago the responsibility for approving regulatory changes was transferred from PCO, from a committee that was called Special Committee of Council, of ministers, to the Treasury Board. This basically just allows it to catch up to the new reality, which is that the Treasury Board is where those decisions are made; therefore, the secretariat supporting that should be there.
There's also a group of communications advisers or coordinators that are present in every region, and we felt again that this fit better with the Treasury Board Secretariat than with PCO. Having a network of regional offices for a very small and focused central agency is not part of our core mandate, so again we transferred that responsibility. There are about 35 employees involved there across the country.
Then there was also a smart regulation initiative that had been going on for a number of years, and we provided a secretariat for that. Again, we felt it was the same argument as before, that the responsibility for regulation is Treasury Board; therefore, that small secretariat and the work associated with it should go with Treasury Board.