Well, I'm fine with trying to answer that one, because I think a lot of our prepared statement has been addressed, and I don't want to reiterate the same things. But one of the impediments to the reclassification, of course, has been service delivery models. It appears that instead of reclassifying the expertise we have, a way of circumventing that is to come up with how we deliver our service.
You are correct when you say there are two. There's one that is current, which is what most departments have; and one that is called activity based, which is the newer model. It takes responsibility away from individual compensation advisors to oversee your account, and what it does, in essence, is to set it up so that your account is handled by as many compensation advisors as there are. If you are getting a promotion, that will go to someone who is doing promotions. If you're getting acting pay or if you're retiring, it will all be very relative to a specific activity, and it is indeed these departments that are causing the greatest number of problems.
The moment you remove responsibility from the compensation advisor, it's a slippery slope to chaos, because now if you have any questions about your account, who do you even address it to in the compensation community? It also takes away expertise overall, because a couple of years down the road, as people are moving on with their expertise and retiring, you will have people who, if a complex issue were to be examined in your account, such as an issue with a T4 that was just not balancing out—Who do we give that to, if no one's done T4s and no one has the overall global knowledge, because all they've done are little bits and pieces of our job overall? So it's caused huge backlogs and chaos, with different people working on the same things.
It's also put people in a situation where, because of the huge backlogs, it's become a health issue. People are working six days a week and still can't keep up with the huge backlogs, so they are leaving. It used to be that compensation advisors could move from one department to another, based on anything from the job being closer to where they lived to their feeling that people were treated better at one job than another. Now fully trained compensation people are leaving; they're not going to compensation jobs in other departments. They're getting out and saying “I'm not going to do this job with this responsibility and this much pressure—given the complexity of the knowledge that's required—for this kind of money.”
So it is the departments—And you did mention one of them, Public Works, and there are CRA and Stats Canada. And DND is in a delivery model that straddles the two at the time but is trying to go to this activity-based model, and we've put up a huge struggle with management to say why this won't work.