Under section 18.1—I believe it is—the CEO has full contracting authority. Section 20, subsection (1), is what provides that special personal services contracting authority, which is subject to Treasury Board approval to fix and pay the rates of pay. So that is something where the Treasury Board would be providing some guidance in terms of the rates of pay that would be subject to those. The function of that is really to make sure that there is an appropriate rate of pay being used, and it's not being used to circumvent public service standards and that sort of thing. It's not a very in-depth oversight, so there's always respect that's given to agents of Parliament and others where there's an independence of office there.
On May 1st, 2014. See this statement in context.