Thank you.
The issue we've faced over the past couple of years, in fact, is to increase the number of people working at Passport Canada. If you look at the number of employees we had at the beginning of the decade, in 2001, for instance, we had more or less 1,000 employees working for Passport Canada and issuing passports within service standards. Over the past two years, the demand has increased by 50%. So to a certain extent we have been playing catch-up with that demand; hence, the significant hiring we've done over the past two years.
Of course we hire people on a permanent basis, but because the demand goes up and down, we also need to hire people on a short-term basis. So one of the problems we face is developing pools of workers who can basically work on a seasonal basis instead of being with us over a 12-month period. That has been part of our challenge, to have these people available when we need them. Historically, we needed these people over the winter months—December, January, February, and March—and then the demand would go very, very low and pick up again in October and November, when we would have to rehire a bunch of people to face the surge in demand. So that has been the main challenge over recent years, the ups and downs in demand.
The second thing is that when we hire indeterminate employees to become passport officers, this is where training starts to cost a significant amount of money, because the employees are trained over a ten-week period at our training centre, and then we put them in our offices, where they're supervised, and so on and so forth.
If we were to lose these people at a high rate, of course, that would mean a significant loss from a financial standpoint, but also from a human resources standpoint.
But over recent years our main challenge has been the ups and downs of demand and how we can manage that. I say this because most of our processes are still manually driven, so our business is highly labour intensive right now.