Mr. Speaker, of course, that is absolutely the case. When we arrived in government, many collective agreements had been expired for three years, and in some cases four years. The core public service, the hard-working people who show up at the Rapibus station in my riding and come to work every day for the people of Canada, had not had a raise, in some cases, in four years. Now 98% of public servants have new collective agreements.
The problem, as I explained, is that to go back and properly calculate the money due to them, we have to go back into the old pay system, the one the Conservative government allowed to collapse, and manually retrieve the data that allows us to do the calculations of their retroactive payments and salaries and process them manually. That has taken an agonizingly long time. For that we apologize. I repeat that every public servant will get every penny due to him or her.