Public Accounts committee  Yes, I do, Mr. Chairman. Thank you very much, and again, may I introduce Michael Small, who is accompanying me here today. He is the brand new assistant deputy minister of human resources as of April 1. I'm very pleased to have the opportunity to meet with you today to describe

Public Accounts committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. I will respond to that question. There are several points in there and I'll try to cover a couple of them. If I may, just before I get to the question you asked, you made the point that we're having trouble attracting people to the department, and that we

Public Accounts committee  And of the department, not only the foreign service.

Public Accounts committee  I don't have the information in front of me, but I'd be prepared to provide it to the committee. It would take some research. I can give you a couple of examples. The one that springs to mind most readily is our ambassador to Afghanistan, Arif Lalani, who comes from a middle eas

Public Accounts committee  We will.

Public Accounts committee  First of all, regarding a human resources plan, I agree that ordinarily, government departments should have such a plan. We had a plan before, but it was not complex enough and not designed or drafted well enough to meet our current needs. The same is true of recruitment. For th

Public Accounts committee  Previously or now?

Public Accounts committee  Yes, of course.

Public Accounts committee  In the plan I mentioned in my remarks, we identified strengths and weaknesses, as you said, and it is because of those weaknesses that we decided to recruit employees for positions other than foreign service officer positions from now on: commercial officers, economic officers an

Public Accounts committee  Yes, of course.

Public Accounts committee  I think your question has to do with our locally engaged staff, if I understand correctly. When we hire locally engaged staff, we do so just as we do when we hire Canada-based staff. It's a competitive process. We put out ads, we interview, and so forth, and there is always, befo

Public Accounts committee  We constantly remind our heads of mission and our people abroad to follow the regulations, which includes security checks and keeping the records up to date.

Public Accounts committee  We're doing a couple of things, one of which, of course is, as you say, that missions have been reminded of their responsibilities as managers of the staff to ensure that the practices that we insist upon and have insisted upon with respect to hiring qualified people, having the

Public Accounts committee  We are taking steps to correct those shortcomings identified by the Auditor General. I can't deny that those shortcomings are there; the Auditor General found those shortcomings.

Public Accounts committee  I don't deny that what is in the Auditor General's report is what she and her staff found, but I can assure you that we are taking steps to correct it.