Thank you, Mr. Chair.
This discussion always comes back to the relative weight of responsibilities among the central agencies, the Treasury Board Secretariat and the deputy ministers and their own departments. It is up to the Treasury Board Secretariat to establish those management policies. They should be doing some monitoring, but I think at the end of the day we also have to say that it is up to the departmental heads to make sure their departments are meeting and respecting the policies that are put in place. The burden isn't only on the Treasury Board Secretariat.
Certainly in this case there is confusion in the policy. There was confusion about roles and responsibilities. I think that underlying a lot of the problems was perhaps the lack of--and I hate to use these words--importance or significance that a lot of people put on this whole area. People allowed contracts to go on for 11 months before security clearances were in place. For the program itself, I'm sure those people there did the very best they could, but when half of your funding is the temporary reallocation each year, it's very difficult. I would expect Treasury Board to perhaps ask where programs like those getting these temporary reallocations are.
If you don't have stable funding in government, it's very difficult to run these programs. If you don't have the people there to do the job.... You have to almost commiserate with these people who are trying to do the workload if they have...I think it was 28% vacancy and another 30% who are temporary people.
At the end of the day, I think there were a lot of factors that came into it. Certainly stable funding is one of the major factors in the problems that we saw.