Information & Ethics committee  Mr. Chairman, may I again ask the director of investigations?

Information & Ethics committee  Actually, I hadn't quite done those figures recently, but if this is of any comfort, Mr. Kenney, twenty years ago I was in an organization operating provincially in a similar style, and the cost was $4,000 almost twenty years ago. So if that's the figure, then it's pretty economical, because I would think that the cost has risen quite a bit in twenty years.

Information & Ethics committee  Mr. Chairman, I would be happy to provide the committee with the details of all these contracts.

Information & Ethics committee  Otherwise we would lack salary dollars. It's very unfortunate; I'm the first to deplore it. Certainly some of those are for investigation contracts. We deplore this, but otherwise we would say, well, we don't have full-time employees, so we can't do it.

Information & Ethics committee  —whose track record is known. They are reliable, they're known, and they'll deliver the goods.

Information & Ethics committee  It's deliberate. As you can see from the pattern, we try to see how much work we can get in an efficient way if we have a known specialist. For example, as you probably know, there are often retired civil servants who have held responsible jobs—

Information & Ethics committee  Serva Inc. is a human resources code, so this may have to do with job classification or it may have to do with writing all of the policies that we didn't have in that organization, for example. Maybe it was setting out procedures for dealing with employees. We had many serious problems in our human resources management, so that may be to help.

Information & Ethics committee  A generation is retiring. I believe Maria Barrados has spoken of this publically.

Information & Ethics committee  Yes. Mr. Chairman, could I ask the director of that branch to respond?

Information & Ethics committee  Yes, we do.

Information & Ethics committee  Yes. I think we're well out of the tunnel. We've had our staffing delegation given back to us by the Public Service Commission, which is a kind of barometer for whether you are good enough to manage your own affairs, which we weren't. We have a clean bill of health every year from the Auditor General.

Information & Ethics committee  That's a good question. They do research that is more related to our investigation functions and to issues that come up through the legislative process. These issues are more related to our immediate role, because that is necessary for us to operate. The research program, called the contributions program, allows people to research things that are very far from our immediate work, but that will eventually be useful.

Information & Ethics committee  Yes, exactly.

Information & Ethics committee  Well, Claude Beaulé, I can tell you, is a computer specialist—

Information & Ethics committee  Mr. Chairman, in an ideal world, I would rather have full-time, in-house staff to do all of that, but the reality now in the hiring zone in Ottawa and the public service is that it's very hard to get people for certain categories of work—notably investigators and people who know about information technology and information rights.