Thank you very much,
Thanks to Mr. McCauley.
I want to come back to some issues related to the RCMP, and thank you again for your commitment not to transfer civilian members of the RCMP on to Phoenix before the system has been fixed.
In the estimates, and we touched on this briefly, there is money, just under $400,000, for the Administrative Tribunals Support Service of Canada to support the implementation of a new labour relations regime within the RCMP. Of course, that funding is for what we could call back-end issues, or it's funding for when things go wrong and they need to be resolved between management and labour.
I wonder if you could comment on the efficiency.... I don't see money allocated to help train RCMP management on how to successfully implement a new labour relations regime in terms of learning how to deal with a union in the workplace and trying to have good labour relations. I wonder if some of the money that's allocated here for the back-end problems perhaps wouldn't need to be spent if RCMP management had training from outside the organization on how to do labour relations right.
This is an evaluative judgment that I don't particularly expect you to endorse, but my experience through the process on Bill C-7 and seeing the attitude of RCMP management in terms of how they treated RCMP members trying to organize was that this is not a management that understands what it means to have a union in the workplace, and they are not really ready to work constructively with a union. It seems to me that some upfront investment in training would be appropriate and would hopefully mean that we would see fewer line items in estimates related to resolving disputes.
I wonder if you could comment on the lack of money for that upfront bit.