Madam Speaker, I thank the member for Cumberland—Colchester for his intervention in this area. I can understand to some extent his frustration.
The Public Service of Canada is indeed one of our greatest assets and the government strives very hard to ensure that the public service in reflects the diversity of the country. I can assure the member that there are employees across the country who are resident in his province, in my province, in British Columbia and in the Northwest Territories. The reality is the public service does reflect residency across the country.
He talked very specifically about the mobility provisions. I believe the President of the Treasury Board answered his question to some extent when he first raised it back on February 15.
However the other issue that is important is the cost to the public service in providing employment applications across the country. It is the policy of the public service to only impose this restriction on certain types of job classifications. I know for a fact that today we are trying to acquire a new auditor general and that is a skill set that goes across the country and is irrelevant as to residency. It is based to some extent on the skill set.
The thought process that is in the Public Service Employment Act is basically to provide, for the Public Service Commission to restrict the hiring practices for one main reason. That is to restrict the number of applicants. Clearly, if the jobs were advertised across the country in certain designated fields, the feeling is that there would be a significant number of applicants and that the public service would have to process those applications. That would be a significant cost to the government. In other words, it is conceptually possible that they would have 30,000 or 40,000 applications for one job and the cost of processing and responding to those applications would be substantial.
I will quickly mention the charter provisions. The Public Service Employment Act has borne the scrutiny of the justice department. It conforms with our charter requirements.
I thank the member for his intervention on this and I look forward to his ideas on how we could change this in the future.