It's two things. It's only for the fiscal year, and so it's an estimated payout.
If you permit, Mr. Chair, there is some history here.
The collective agreements—and I'll generalize—had a clause that basically said for every year you work, you accumulate a week of severance, and that severance would be applied whether you were retiring, departing voluntarily, going to the private sector, and when you left you would effectively get those funds.
As the collective agreements have expired, we've been negotiating away the accumulation of severance, but it was important to the government to honour what had been earned to date. You can't backtrack on what had already been earned. For those collective agreements that have negotiated out the severance, employees were given a choice. They could take their money now or they could wait until they retire or they could do a mix. The $955 million is what we're estimating will actually flow out the door this year based on employees cashing out.
To date, we have now negotiated away severance in all of the collective agreements in the core public service. So the negotiation piece is done, but there will still be cash flowing out for a number of years as we go forward.