Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I will respond to that question. There are several points in there and I'll try to cover a couple of them.
If I may, just before I get to the question you asked, you made the point that we're having trouble attracting people to the department, and that we can't recruit higher than our attrition rate. In fact, we are doing just that. For the year that finished in 2007, we brought on about 600-and-some employees and about 330 left, so we are in fact staffing over our attrition rate.
That does not, of course, hide the fact that attracting good people in this day and age is extremely difficult. The public service as a whole is facing competition from the private sector and elsewhere, so as the Auditor General pointed out in her report, the requirement to find non-traditional ways of recruiting and attracting employees is a paramount challenge for us. That's what we are trying to do, and I tried to explain in my opening comments that we are moving in that direction.
With respect to the kinds of people we hire, I have to say that I have not run across, in my time in the department, any rule against hiring people because of their countries of origin. There may be some hearsay around that, perhaps, but certainly we have no restrictions on that. In fact, it's quite the contrary. We are very anxious to hire new Canadians, Canadians who are visible minorities, Canadians who can bring their particular cultural, linguistic, and other backgrounds to the service of Canada's foreign service. The recruitment drives that we have across the country are very much open to recruiting these kinds of people. In fact, I would say they are the future of our foreign service.