Government Operations Committee on Feb. 10th, 2011

[Richard Dicerni]

Not necessarily. Our management group meets once a month to review where we are at with our budget. We will be making some investments in Helen's area, for example, to improve our capacity to technologically deal with licences that we provide, as well as the cash that comes in.

[Siobhan Coady, Liberal, St. John's South—Mount Pearl, NL]

So you may be making some human resource decisions around it, but by and large the numbers will be the same.

[Richard Dicerni]

Overall we don't expect major changes, but in the same way that during the auto crisis we did slow down staffing in order to have additional resources to apply to these management consulting firms to do the due diligence on the car deals--

[Siobhan Coady, Liberal, St. John's South—Mount Pearl, NL]

Those are management decisions that you will make, but in general you're going to be on par number-wise. I think that's what you furnished to the Parliamentary Budget Officer, save for those 100 positions that we talked about earlier.

[Richard Dicerni]

Yes; we do have, I would say, a plan, but given the churn.... Let's say you have a churn of 600 or 700 jobs a year that become open. We have a fairly tight management oversight regarding—

[Siobhan Coady, Liberal, St. John's South—Mount Pearl, NL]

When you hire and how you hire.

[Richard Dicerni]

Yes.

[Siobhan Coady, Liberal, St. John's South—Mount Pearl, NL]

Okay. But it's literally that at some point during the year these positions will be filled.

The reason I'm saying this is that there's not going to be a major change in human resources within Industry, except for, say, instead of hiring in January, you might hire in March, and those two months' savings—

[Richard Dicerni]

A variety of these tools indeed are the ones that we will put in play. We will cut down a bit more on travelling. We'll cut down a bit more on consulting, and delay some staffing, and invest in some technology.

[Siobhan Coady, Liberal, St. John's South—Mount Pearl, NL]

I'm assuming that you have a human resources plan, then. I think you alluded to it earlier.

[Richard Dicerni]

We do, and we monitor it on a regular basis.

[Siobhan Coady, Liberal, St. John's South—Mount Pearl, NL]

I noted that in the Parliamentary Budget Officer's report on budget freeze, in the report content table showing both “risks” and “strategies”, for Industry Canada it had “no” and “no”. Human Resources, for example, had “yes” and “yes”.

Can you confirm that, please?

[Richard Dicerni]

Well, I saw that too, and I queried it, because in the document we call the business plan.... We didn't have, granted, a heading that said “risks”; however, if you look at page 20, it very explicitly discusses the human resource challenges we face and how we are seeking to mitigate those challenges.

So although we didn't have that subheading—

[Siobhan Coady, Liberal, St. John's South—Mount Pearl, NL]

You do have that.

[Richard Dicerni]

—page 20 lays it all out.

[Siobhan Coady, Liberal, St. John's South—Mount Pearl, NL]

Okay. Perfect.

You're committed, obviously, to maintaining service quality and eliminating or minimizing business risk. I'm assuming that.

[Richard Dicerni]

Yes.

[Siobhan Coady, Liberal, St. John's South—Mount Pearl, NL]

Okay, thank you.

How much time do I have?

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

You have 30 seconds.

[Siobhan Coady, Liberal, St. John's South—Mount Pearl, NL]

Okay. I wanted to go back to a point you made earlier, and this was about the cabinet confidences.

In 2005, as you know, the Liberal government put on a website, even before the cuts were implemented and even before the estimates were brought forward, some of those cuts we're going to be seeing, some of the strategic review processes, and it wasn't a cabinet confidence. It was more this is from a planning exercise, strategic decisions made by management; this is how we're going forward.

We can't seem to get an understanding.... We already know there are budget limitations. Have you done that kind of exercise, and they're just not published at this point?

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

Mr. Dicerni, please.

[Richard Dicerni]

As I mentioned, we have identified within the request that was given to the department on the strategic review. We've made various presentations, but no decisions have been made. So it's not a question of our not being able to share. It's that I am not aware that the decision has been made.

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

Thank you, Madam Coady.

Thank you, Mr. Dicerni, Ms. Gillis, and Ms. McDonald.

[Chris Warkentin, Conservative, Peace River, AB]

Mr. Chair, It would be nice to have another round.

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

No.