That's a tough question. I would say that some of the change management with staff probably could have been done better than we did it. We were given—and frankly, it was a good thing—a very tight, strict deadline. We had two years to do this, so the $100 million of savings that was achieved was actually minuted out of ministries' budgets over a period of two years. As you all know, when you minute out money from ministry budgets, you really have to achieve what you said you would do.
So we had very strict deadlines in doing what we had to do.Therefore, I think in all honesty we probably.... We moved just close to a thousand people out from those nine clusters into the consolidated organization. That was very tough for those thousand people. They typically arrived still doing their old jobs, because it takes a long time to sort out a lot of the residue of what's left in that big organization.
If we'd had more time, I would say that it would have been much easier from a staff perspective if we had been better prepared to receive them into that new organization. When you're scattered over the province of Ontario, and we were.... We had perhaps one group servicing Natural Resources. They were doing maybe servers, e-mail, laptops and PC support, and maybe some help desk stuff. You might have had three or four people doing that for a small office. We came along and said, “Okay, the server person, you're in the server organization, and the PC person, you're there”. It was just very, very difficult, especially in smaller offices, to try to sort out who was doing what.
So I think if there was one thing I had my druthers to change, I would probably like to have been a little more organized when we received people in. But again, as I think I said—I'm not sure I said it—one thing that was very important for us was that we talked and communicated all the time to people, so at least they knew what was going on even though it was happening to them.