I'm sure it's something they would have to consider when they do their overall planning.
I keep coming back to planning. Frankly, since I've been working in this job, I'm realizing how critical it is to good management and to dealing with all kinds of questions, including the one you ask.
In terms of planning for a department, when a deputy head is leading that process, the first level is that really strategic level--for example, what the business of that particular department is, what the main business lines are, what the needs are that spread across Canada, etc. Then what they really have to do is cascade that down so that every sub-leader.... I would be the next level, the assistant deputy minister. If I'm running old age security or whatever, I have to really do that in depth for my own, and I expect everyone who's underneath me to feed in, so that I can give a really good picture of my business, my people needs, my finance, and everything else. That has to actually form that overall integrated plan for a department.
The bottom line here is that the questions you're asking are big questions for a department that they need to engage in. I'll be very honest with you: integrated planning is evolving and getting better with time, but most departments and deputies who find they're doing it well now have told us that it's taken two to three years of changing the energy and the dialogue in the department to get into planning and that type of open conversation that brings the people piece in, and that when they've spent two to three years really doing it, they start to see excellent results.
I'll give you an example. I can't speak to HRSD, but a few years ago the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, as you know, with food safety becoming a big issue in Canada, got lots of new funding in their budget to deal with big national issues of importance. Their deputy shared the fact that a whole lot of new expectations were put on the department with that. They needed to sit down right away and start talking about what this set of new business needs would mean and how they were going to recruit the people they needed. They needed to look at scientific recruitment--which is challenging in and of itself--and something they called a hyperspecialist, a situation in which there might be one expert in North America to do that type of science.
For me, it was a live example of a management team taking ownership of the business it needed to do for Canadians and then really figuring out what the people stuff was.
I'm just saying that you have to have that kind of dynamic. The deputy has to have a plan, and that plan has to be shared with employees.