Yes. Thank you very much.
There were at least six, which I enumerated at the start. The PCO has developed and distributed a document entitled: “A Guide to Managing the Governor in Council Appointments Process”. That sets out the expected standards for rigour, for communication, for the guidance in terms of appointees and communication issues.
We've also, again responding to the very valid points made by the Auditor General, worked on vacancy management. PCO now provides ministers and their departments with a monthly report outlining all appointments that are set to expire within the next 12 months. So in a sense, there is full information coming up.
Thirdly, related again to observations by the Auditor General, we have tried to address the management of upcoming expiries in our guidance to ministers and to their departments. For full-time appointees, ministers should now determine whether a reappointment will be recommended at least six months before the end of the appointee's term. For part-time appointees, this should now be at least three months before a term expires. Again, we're responding to concerns of the Auditor General over a number of years.
The fourth change relates to increasing the transparency and access to the GIC appointments process, something the Auditor General has raised in previous audits going back over a decade. In April 2006, the government launched the Governor in Council appointments website, which actually makes it fully transparent. That is a substantial change. It allows interested candidates across the country to have access to selection processes for positions in over 200 government organizations.
Fifthly, we've broadened the scope of recruitment efforts for these positions. We have a rigorous selection process. We have the selection and publication of appropriate selection criteria, public advertisements, and assessment of candidates through interviews and reference checks. That's a substantial change from previous practice, and it's applied uniformly, again something the Auditor General had asked us to do.
The sixth change--and again, the Auditor General in this report I think notes the improvement here as well--is that we have responded to her previous concerns about the need for enhanced training and orientation for both stakeholders and appointees. We now have one-on-one orientation sessions for new chairs, for heads of agencies, for CEOs of crown corporations, and regular workshops on how to implement the appointments process.
As I said, there are over 1,000 GIC appointments per year. It's over 200 organizations and agencies across the government. That's a very diverse and distributed system. I think these sorts of changes actually make a substantial difference and again respond very much to the valid and helpful observations of the Office of the Auditor General over a number of years.