Thank you.
Let me say that at the conference I spoke about—it was in February, I believe, of this year—there were people there from the federal public service and various provinces across the country. One of the speakers asked how many of us were doing appropriate workforce planning. Probably one-third of the people in the room put up their hands. This individual was quite surprised. She was from the U.S. and did a lot of work in workforce planning in the U.S. private and public sectors. She thought it was a large number. In fact, most of the one-third who put up their hands were from federal government departments and agencies and said they were mandated to do that.
That's a good thing. Going forward, it's crucial to have a workforce planning exercise and process in place that's fully aligned with the business plan. It needs to be fully integrated as to what's the business, what are the skills and competencies we need to achieve our goals in this business of serving Canadians, and how are we going to get those skills in the door or ramp them up quickly? So integrated workforce planning is critical, and I commend the federal public service for getting started in that area. Those at other government levels are not where they need to be.
So it's an excellent strategy to move forward; it's the only strategy to move forward. It'll help make decisions like where do we go, what skills do we need, what skills do we not need, how are we going to bring them in, and should we use technology instead of people? There's the whole supply-demand issue. How do we deal with issues like that?