On the corporate administrative shared services initiative, we launched that a couple of years ago now, to basically look at this and to get almost like a pilot project moving forward on back office shared services.
We started that work, and my assessment is that we probably oversubscribed the initiative. We brought in 12 departments. We were going to take 12 departments and take all their back office functions--HR, finance, and materiel--and bring them together. That would have been part of a significant upfront investment. I think what we learned as we looked to other governments was that many other governments started a lot smaller than that and had a number of gates to move forward through and pilot it as they went ahead.
So a little over a year ago, we kind of went back to the drawing board. We reduced the number of departments. In fact, we have five departments now that are part of the shared service initiative. We have taken one function, which is HR, and we have looked at bringing HR functions for those five departments together in a shared service model. That proposal is essentially ready to go to the board now. I hope the board will approve it and give us the funding that we need to move it forward.
Unfortunately, in coming to a decision, we had to pick five departments of a reasonable size, so we don't have the small agencies in any of that, but they're part of the work we're doing, and we would hope that as we move this forward, we can bring other departments, including small agencies, into the shared services model.
I guess that in some ways you have to start someplace to prove that the model does in fact work. We feel quite confident that it does. Do you know why? Because this is not new. B.C. has done this. Alberta has been doing this. Other countries have been doing this. Our view is that we just need to get on with it. The quicker we get on with it and test it, the quicker we believe we can bring on the other departments and other agencies that really need this support.