I believe that's a trend for the whole public service. There are more executives in the national capital region than there are in the rest of the country. You have more of the senior positions. You have the headquarters of the departments in the national capital region. They're located where their ministers are, so that's not surprising.
There could be a number of things going on, and I'm not sure exactly what all is going on. Without a doubt, we have work becoming more complicated. We have a government that is changing, that is moving from a lot of the clerical, routine kind of work. We're automating more of that work. We're farming more of that out. We're looking for more higher-educated, strategic-thinking kinds of individuals. You would be paying those people more, and hence it's not surprising you have them in the executive group.
The other thing we have going on is that the executive group is the group that has the greatest amount of retirement. The retirements departure in the public service tends to run around 4%. The executive group is 9%. Most of the growth that you see in the executive group, the big growth, is at the junior level, that EX-1 level. There has to be replacement and development. We paid a terrible price for the freezes we had in the nineties. There are some gaps in that executive group, so we have to bring those people up.
Those are two quite possible explanations. There could be some great inflation as well. But I'm not really in a position to say what exactly we've got going on there.