I think part of the response is that it's not that we weren't monitoring the amount of overtime that was being spent. What the Auditor General pointed out, rightfully, was that when we noticed the trend, we were not necessarily taking the concerted action that we should have to try to manage or control it. It's something within the organization that, over the years, has been cyclical. When time and attention have been put on the overtime issue, we have seen some decreases in certain areas, but we've seen other things that suffer. For example, we have wardens then who are focusing all their time on managing the next overtime dollar and not necessarily staying focused on the public safety results.
We know we have to find the right balance. We need to address the general management piece, but we also know that we have to tackle some of the root causes of the overtime differently from the way we have in the past. For example, we saw a significant jump between the year 2006-07 and 2007-08 of about $13 million in our overtime expenditures as a result of the change of the collective agreement for the correctional officers. The correctional officers got a 13% increase in their wages and moved from being 37.5-hour-per-week workers to 40-hour-per-week workers. That had a significant impact in the actual dollars being paid when somebody was working overtime.
We know that as a result of the changes in the offender population profile over the last several years—a more violent, more acting-out type of population—we've had more incidents in our institutions, a couple of major riots. When we have those kinds of incidents, we have to deploy additional correctional staff; we have to deploy our emergency response teams.