Government Operations committee  I will do part of the answer to your question. I am going to talk about the mandate of the Privy Council Office. With respect to numbers, I'll ask my numbers expert to jump in, as I always do. I'm not in a position to speak about what the role of the Privy Council Office would b

Government Operations committee  No. The Privy Council Office would respond as its own department, the Privy Council Office per se, in the way that we did to his request in September. We put our response on our website. With respect to your question, I think your question was around the number, the money, the f

Government Operations committee  I'll ask Mr. Bélisle to answer that question.

Government Operations committee  The Privy Council Office indeed participated vigorously in both summits. There were a number of places in the Privy Council Office that supported the Prime Minister in the most recent meeting in early January, including the operations secretariat, where the policy experts on abor

Government Operations committee  I'm not in a position to speak to the question of whether summits with first nations should be listed as having to do with specific orders of government, but I can assure you that the Privy Council Office took a whole-of-department integrated approach, including with Ian's folks,

Government Operations committee  We are using our existing operating dollars to do that. There were no incremental resources allocated. We were able to use the folks and resources we had on hand and to respond effectively, I believe and I hope, to first nations' needs and the Prime Minister's needs in this regar

Government Operations committee  In my opening remarks I spoke about the decision that's been taken to continue to support for another two years the work of Ward Elcock as the special adviser. Mr. Elcock took office on September 15, 2010, with an overall mandate to coordinate the government strategy in respon

Government Operations committee  Of these myriad preparations that I did to come before you today, I'm afraid I don't have that one in my little basket of tricks. It may be that Mr. McArdle is better placed to answer that question.

Government Operations committee  Yes, and I'd be happy to give you the precise numbers around those. I'll get back to you with those.

Government Operations committee  I spoke a few minutes ago about what internal services are at the Privy Council Office. Because we don't have programs per se, we don't have back-office costs associated with programs.

Government Operations committee  In fact, I can't, because I'm not involved with them; that's why I'm not in a position to speak to them. The only thing I will add is that back-office costs associated with programs would involve an element of internal services costs, because internal services costs are common

Government Operations committee  I'm not sure what pages you are referring to, but I certainly could speak to the PCO numbers having to do with employees who were affected.

Government Operations committee  I understand now. Thank you for that clarification. Those are the numbers of the employees in my branch only. We spoke earlier about making a significant number of cuts to internal services in the Privy Council Office. Those cuts have been implemented in my branch, so the size of

Government Operations committee  I understand your question.

Government Operations committee  I understand the question, and it has a two-part response. The first part is that, both in my branch and across the Privy Council Office, the majority of the employees who received opting letters have left the Government of Canada. They chose the option to leave the Government o