That's a wonderful question, sir.
I have the good fortune of having been a civil servant through the recessions of 1980-81 and 1990-91 and the program review experience of both the mid-1990s and now. Certainly, while as a government we face some economic and fiscal challenges as we go through this recession into recovery, this is nothing like the challenge of the mid-1990s.
We entered this in a relatively better-off situation in terms of our debt and deficit load, and we're coming out of it with a sterling first quarter this year of 6.1% annualized growth. The measures will not need to be as onerous as we experienced over a decade ago.
The operating budget freeze as well is a freeze that, as departmental managers, we welcome, because it leaves a great deal of latitude to departments to allocate this according to their own needs and priorities. In the mid-1990s we had quite severe and dramatic action on the human resource side. Thousands of civil service jobs were eliminated. There was as well a staffing freeze of various incarnations. These left a legacy that some have referred to as a “lost decade”--a management gap that we've never really been able to fully regain.
We are more fortunate this time. The economic and fiscal environment is more fortuitous. Secondly, this measure of an operating freeze allocates more flexibility and helps us mitigate the human resource aspects of it relative to either a staffing freeze or a salary reduction, which would obviously make recruitment either difficult or impossible.