Thank you very much for the questions.
Concerning the first one, about the development of the management skills in the executive cadre, there is now mandatory training on financial, human resource, and access to information authorities before they are delegated to a manager. Everyone who receives those delegations has to go through a training program at the Canada School of Public Service. That's one way we are attempting to improve our cadre.
There is another way we're doing it. We have now developed a program called the advanced leadership program. It's only for 25 to 30 people, and they are absolutely the highest-potential people we have in the public service. We have developed a nine-week program for them, which ran once last year and will run again this year. The purpose of that program is to take them at a mid-career level and bring them forward; in other words, expose them to a lot of new ideas, internationally and domestically, and a lot of new approaches to big problems and have them come back to the public service much better equipped to take on some of the senior roles.
We also have another program called Leaders Across Borders, which is doing something similar in conjunction with the United Kingdom and Australia and New Zealand. This is a little exchange program, in which a dozen of our senior leaders go to those countries and theirs come here for a week to share best practices in the Westminster tradition.
We also have another program called “Canada at 150”. This is a really novel idea that has worked out very well. Departments were asked to identify fairly new recruits who had about five years' experience and were showing a lot of interest in the policy issues facing Canada. They have gotten together three times as a group—150 of them. Their purpose is to look at the challenges facing Canada in 2017, when it will be 150 years old. Some of the work they are doing is showing great promise. They will have one more event before they present their report. They are people from all over the federal government. It is one of those interesting new ideas, which seems to be stimulating a new generation in their commitment to and experience in public service.