I can give you an example. I am an Industry Canada employee. I have been working at Statistics Canada since October 2006, and I still am. There are four of us helping them out. It is just chaos over there. Of course they're not talking about that in the newspapers, but they're so backlogged it is unbelievable. We are still answering e-mails that employees have sent to the compensation unit going back to 2006. We are doing pension estimates. We are doing elective service for people who want to buy back service. They are short-staffed.
Of course they're losing fully trained compensation advisers who are going to agencies that pay more for the same type of work. They've been replaced. For example, if I give you eight compensation advisers, fully trained, they will receive eight trainees from this new trainee job bank. Well, they have no experience at all. For the ones who are still there, they're stuck doing their own work and having to train at the same time. It's not helping them at all. I wish some of them could have been here today, but they are so backlogged that not one person was able to attend. That's just an example. I know for Public Works, even though they say they're fully up to date, they are not. We've been speaking to many compensation advisers.
Each department still has the same problem of transfers within different departments. Of course transfers in the compensation unit are not what we call an emergency. An emergency is putting somebody on payroll, or if somebody is retiring we have to cut them off pay. These are what we call emergencies. For them, transfers are not an emergency, but the impact is so much that it impacts their taxes and their deductions. There is a big impact.
Some of them are transferring to other departments with a promotion, but we can't do the promotion. We can't do anything until those transfers are done. We're all waiting for answers from all these different departments, the compensation unit, to be able to do the transfer, but they're so backlogged this is not their priority.