Thank you, Mr. Chair.
A couple of elements. For example, when pools used to be established—and a pool is essentially a group of people who qualify for a set of positions or a generic position—the requirements under the previous legislation and policies were that people were ranked. If you had 10 people in the pool, people were ranked 1 to 10.
To be able to hire someone from the pool or make them an offer, you had to take people in order of rank, whether or not those people were the best fit for the job, which then made for some very difficult situations, where the person was in the number three spot and a job you had to offer them didn't necessarily match. Even though the competencies might, the fit and the experience might not, but you had to hire that person.
Under the new policies, the pool is established, there are 10 people in the pool, and you can hire the person who is the best fit according to the competencies and requirements of the position. So those are greater flexibilities, and that allows the people in the pool to be able to accept different jobs. Because the people in the pool, the employees themselves, were also limited to the job that was put in front of them.
It's a small example, but not an unimportant one, because we do a lot more staffing by pools, by collective staffing, on the basis of generic positions in order to reduce the time to staff, because that has been one of the important flexibilities that have been brought into the legislation.
The other aspect is that you can use pools—I'll continue that example—to staff across the country. You will recall that the national area of selection was also introduced part way through the implementation of the legislation, which broadened—and rightly so—at the request of parliamentarians, access to people across the country to public service jobs. So we now have a broader base and a richer set of potential employees to choose from, but it also has given the manager the flexibility to be able to find the best person for the fit in a more timely fashion.