Fisheries committee  Thank you to the committee. We really appreciate your questions and keeping us on our toes. We believe it's a good partnership, so we hope we have been of assistance to you in your work.

Fisheries committee  That is difficult to say on a yearly basis because we still manage to get a lot done with the funding at our disposal. We think that we do quite a good job. It will never be perfect. Like you, I have not been in office very long, so I really do not know.

Fisheries committee  That is a question for the government as a whole. The government has to deal with a number of priorities. There are gaps everywhere. We will always have discussions like this. What is a priority for someone today is not a priority for someone else. Health and safety are priorities, and we are dealing with them.

Fisheries committee  No, it's not so much that.... Ministers' offices would receive the same information, obviously, because it goes to the minister, but they would interpret it possibly in a different way, and there needs to be room in the process for the discussion to happen. As you know, people in ministers' offices have a lot of local knowledge as well and may interpret information that comes in, in a way that might be different from the way the department might interpret it.

Fisheries committee  It depends on whether there's an investigation or not.

Fisheries committee  Thank you for the question. You're right. Bureaucracies could keep growing to just satisfy themselves if they were not held in check. It's always a matter of checks and balances. As you may know, in the public service there's a very rigorous performance management assessment of what we call the EX cadre that goes on every year, meaning all the people in the management side, versus the union side.

Fisheries committee  It's conducted at all levels within the EX system and at the final stage. So it starts with the supervisor, to the next in line, and then the whole of the EX cadre is reviewed by the whole of the management team. So the ADMs and the deputies sit together once a year and review the performance of every one of the managers in the department.

Fisheries committee  Yes. I meant to say in the communities, but still, small towns have neighbourhoods too.

Fisheries committee  Fine.

Fisheries committee  I will ask Cal to talk to you about our planning system. We live in the long term, the medium term and the short term. We do plans and analyses for the long term, to show us where we want to go, and we deal with the short term by handling specific and immediate crises. The long-term plan mostly depends on our close cooperation with community volunteers who agree to take on a lot of responsibilities.

Fisheries committee  We agree there's tension, and we certainly agree that the science we've been doing up to now has not given us the indication that the fears people are talking about are materializing. But it requires further work, and we are absolutely committed to doing that work.

Fisheries committee  I can tell you it is ongoing. It's a very high priority for us, as you can imagine.

Fisheries committee  As you know, employment equity is a very real issue across the public service. None of us feel that we are attaining the objectives we think we should be attaining. I can tell you, every department across government is focusing on this. Each of the ADMs has within their performance contract some focus on ensuring that the employment equity targets that we've set are actually going to be met, because it's clear that we need to be much more reflective, even at the more senior levels, in Canada as a whole.

Fisheries committee  Cal has more experience, so he'll answer this. Collective bargaining for the government is done by the Treasury Board Secretariat. It's done across the whole of government. So we don't make those kinds of decisions; we would participate as a whole. What we do is manage our relationships within our departments.

Fisheries committee  Cal will speak to the specifics, but I can say that in all of our programs--and you heard me say this when I came to introduce myself to the committee--I view myself as a work in progress all the time, and I view the work of the department as a work in progress all the time, so all of our programs ought to be forever in a state of improvement.