Madam Speaker, frankly I am very disappointed to hear such an irresponsible analysis. The President of the Treasury Board indicated clearly to the member for St. Albert that there had been no increase.
The president undertook, on March 2, to look into the specifics of the matter and to provide him with additional information. And that is what I am doing this evening. I would like to provide a more detailed answer.
I hope there is no attempt on the part of Reform Party members to suggest their analysis is accurate. The problem may be confusion with the terms executive and management. In the context of part III of the estimates the term executive is a classification term referring to a specific occupational group. The term management is used to refer to an activity, a function or planning element which is used for the purposes of resource planning.
More specifically, reference was made to figure 6 on page 2-43 of the part III for Treasury Board where there is mention of 85 FTEs, full-time equivalents. These FTEs are made up of 19 for the president's office, 16 for the secretary's office, 5 for the office of the chief informatics officer, 22 for the planning and communications directorate, 10 for legal services support and 13 for a special reserve. This total only includes four positions that are executive or the equivalent. Therefore, it was erroneous on the part of the hon. member to draw the conclusion that the secretariat was increasing its executives.
There was no increase.
I want to finish off very quickly by saying there has been a decrease over four years of about 30 per cent. We expect this decrease will continue.
Surely the hon. member knows that nobody gets paid $350,000 a year.