I appreciate the question and this important opportunity to clarify something on which I can see there's some confusion in certain quarters.
It's very important that positions are eliminated under these restraint exercises. Under strategic review, and most recently under the deficit reduction action plan, we have eliminated positions. In the most recent exercise, 163 positions were eliminated.
In terms of the people occupying those positions, these people are called “affected” in the human resource jargon of government. We put in place a job placement team for these people, whereby we have offered them every possible opportunity to find gainful employment within our department, within the government, or, of course, if they're at retirement, to take advantage of retirement. They have other opportunities as well. I'm only highlighting the key ones.
Our management team focuses on these affected people every week. Every week we review the people we've placed and the people we've not placed, until we've worked it through.
Turning back to the strategic review and the statistics I mentioned, 95% of the people affected in those positions that were eliminated have been successfully placed: the majority within the department, many across other government departments, and some have taken retirement. I spoke about, and you quite rightly referenced, attrition. As our workforce turns over, as people go into retirement, it opens up 400 or 500 jobs each year, so we certainly have flexibility to move people in a way that respects the requirements of the position.
In the most recent round, which is the DRAP, we're getting close to having placed 90% of the 163 people who were in those affected positions.