Thank you.
I apologize for coming into this process late, so some of the questions may have already been asked. I'll know, when my colleagues are rolling their eyes, that's the case, so just do cut me off at that point.
On the upcoming retirements, yes, there's a downside in terms of the loss of knowledge, the inability to transfer that knowledge, but to me it seems it also represents a huge upside in an economy where we're losing tons of decent-paying jobs. There is an opportunity within the public service to provide those jobs and to give some hope to young people. I find that side of things really exciting. But of course that kind of change needs to be managed and monitored. So I just have a couple of questions that come out of that.
To my mind, delaying retirements isn't the answer to the problem. It may be a stopgap, but I don't even think it's a desirable stopgap. So I wonder, first of all, whether you might comment on whether that is part of the strategic thinking.
Secondly, I don't believe that EE targets are part of the criteria that are looked at with respect to temporary, casual, or student employees, and yet in many ways those categories, it seems to me, make the natural feeder pool, if you will, into permanent positions. I know that my colleague Mr. Albrecht talked about visible minorities, but employment equity really should go far beyond that.
I'm not sure whether you have statistics, for example, on the disabled community, on native Canadians. The outreach for each of those groups is a little bit different because really the process starts with recruitment, not just with the hiring. If you don't get the right people to apply we'll never change the numbers. So I wonder if you could comment on that a little bit.
Then the last question--because I know that I'm limited in time--is temporary, casual, and student employees are one part of filling job vacancies, but I know there's also been, at least in recent history, a trend towards contracting out, and not contracting out just specific jobs but rather entire projects and the staffing associated with those projects. I wonder if you can comment a little bit about, first, the numbers of potential employees that would affect who otherwise might be in the public service full-time, because they too will take experiences away with them that we then can't benefit from within the public service.
I'm sure that will generate a bunch of more questions, but I'll stop there for now. Thanks.