It is, as you have pointed out, a focus and a priority that the Clerk of the Privy Council has put out there for the public service. We are taking it very seriously and looking for significant concrete action to be taken at all levels of leadership.
I would also highlight that, in addition to the call to action, which I've mentioned is reinforcing the importance of action, there's a lot of work that has been done, but we haven't made enough progress. It is actually looking for ways to improve the results we have. We're working on that.
The deputy ministers have also received, in their performance management for the current year, a request to take on particular activities. We've given them a list of things that we are expecting them to do around training, awareness, retention, promotion and leadership development in terms of Black employees in particular and all the different groups of visible minorities and persons with disabilities.
We are expecting people to take significant action. Some of that is training and awareness building, things like unconscious bias training, and then going even deeper into the organizations to make sure there is a dialogue, so that the voices of public servants are heard, people who have, potentially, experienced a very different public service from the ideal we strive for.
There will be an effort to improve recruitment and retention. I would point out that, for some of that, we often have very good results on representation at different levels of the public service. I know we need to do more to ensure that the leadership levels reflect the same diversity and representation. There are efforts to do external recruitment, to look more carefully at our hiring processes and promotion processes inside the organization, to look at any of the systemic barriers and to review policies and programs related to human resources and to hiring.
The disaggregated data that I mentioned is helping us understand, within the representativeness of the public service, where there are particular gaps and areas of focus, in terms of either particular functions and communities or different racialized groups and how they may be represented and under-represented.
That will help ensure that we have a much broader and comprehensive approach going forward in terms of improving the representation of Black employees as well as other racialized groups.