If I may, Mr. Chair, the core public service or the core public administration has over 200,000 employees. In order for us, and for Ms. Cartwright, to get a sense of how deep were the changes and how they were felt, being able to consult or contact 500 people among the 200,000 is not a huge number of people to be in touch with.
I would say that the PSMA and the changes to the legislation that have been brought forward have in fact brought the level of responsibility of deputy heads to just manage, if I can put it that way, to be clearly stated. I would say that has in fact been the trend. It is a bit difficult, going back to our measurement issue, to measure that. How do you measure that? How can you ask the deputy heads today what has changed between the way we did it and the way it is done today? Well, you could ask how much time you spent on this and how much time you spend today. We're looking for proxies of measurement at this point.
The other element would be to look at our governance structures. How much time do we spend at the management table on human resources? I would say that it is about 100% more time than we used to spend. Again, it is very hard to put a quantitative.... It would be kind of a guesstimate. I don't think the public service has grown in relation to the implementation of these pieces of legislation. In fact, what it has done is give us flexibility.
I'll give you another example. We were completely ground down in grievance procedures, because that was the only way for people to complain. Under the legislation, we now practice--have not just put in place but practice—informal conflict resolution. If you look at the complaints that are taken to the public service tribunal, they are resolved even before they get to the tribunal, per se, to be heard. That, in fact, reduces a lot of time and effort. It actually deals with public service management as any other organization would, which is to manage and have interactions with people, as opposed to saying, “Did I file this? Check. Did I do this? Check.” That's what this piece of legislation was meant to do. It was to get out of that rules-based management and get into the management of people as people.