If I may, I would like, Madam Chairperson, to put this on the record. I would not want to leave the impression or convey some perception that a group is taken out of PCO because it is not sufficiently important, or that these people were not doing anything useful. It's quite the contrary.
The logic that presided over that reorganization, it seems to me, is fairly simple. The clerk asked what primary role is PCO supposed to be playing. The role is one, as we say, of challenging. Well, you cannot challenge something that you have produced yourself, because by definition you will think that it's the best thing in the world. So what he was trying to do was to bring those organizations that were helpful and were doing good work in PCO to the place he thought they would be clearly--what I will call for the sake of the discussion--at home.
When we're talking about social trends, HRSDC is where they should be, and they're supposed to work in collaboration with other departments in a horizontal fashion. There is no need for these people to be in PCO in those circumstances, because we cannot challenge what they're doing. PCO in its current incarnation is then in a position, with respect to that group that you're talking about or the secretariat that was dealing with aboriginal issues, to play its true role, which is to challenge their policies for the purpose of making sure we have the best product possible.
That is the logic that presided over this whole transfer. It was no more and no less. They are good people who are doing good work that is valuable for Canadians, but their home is elsewhere. Perhaps when they were brought into PCO earlier, there was a good reason for it. But looking at the circumstances of the environment as we saw it, we thought that it would be better for them to go back to where they're supposed to be and for us in PCO to play our traditional role, which is to coordinate, be coherent, and challenge. That's the reason these changes were made. It was not with a view to cutting positions or anything of the sort, but rather to make this a little closer to what the PCO role ought to be.