I'll make three points on this.
The first point is that Public Works, like most other federal departments, is facing a renewal challenge. This is just a reality. I don't know if committee members know, but our attrition rate through the pensioning of our staff who leave after finishing their careers is almost 9% per annum. So at 9% per year, multiplied by five, you're getting to 50% attrition for a department of 14,000 people.
I'm worried, and so is the minister, about the knowledge that we need to be able to keep. So we're very active at having good planning to give us good recruitment patterns, so we can get the right skills at the right places for the right jobs.
On the issue of public service employment in Ottawa or headquarters versus the regions, I think it is fair to say, speaking for my neck of the woods, that our operations in the regions are.... For instance, we administer pensions out of Shediac. As another example, we also process cheques for reconciliation out of Matane. In the pensions area, we have almost 600 people, so it is not a small unit.
We have evidence to show that the movement in the regions is not as high as in other bigger centres. That is what I would say. Frankly, I've been in the regions on two occasions in my career, and I found that the regional jobs are very close to the citizens. It's a feeling that you don't necessarily have elsewhere. You have a tactile sense of what the job is about, and I'm almost tempted to associate that with a level of satisfaction, because you feel things.
Take, for instance, our OSME operation in the regions. We have six of those offices in the regions, and also one in Ottawa, and now that we've moved it to the ground level, our people will experience that feeling. When you're in a region, you're going to see people; you're going to see OSME, the Office of Small and Medium Enterprises; you're going to relate to provincial officials, and even to other federal departments. There's a proximity that you don't feel as much when you're at headquarters, which I think maybe does point to a level of job satisfaction that can be different from that in bigger centres.