Government Operations committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. I am very pleased to be here today to discuss, on my own behalf and my fellow commissioners'—Susan Cartwright and Daniel Tucker—the Public Service Commission's 2012-13 annual report, tabled in Parliament on November 6. The mandate of the Public Service Com

Government Operations committee  Thank you very much for the question. I would give the credit for this to my predecessor, Maria Barrados, who, in looking at the use of technology, put in place a number of important tools. For example, we now use unsupervised Internet testing so Canadians can apply for many of

Government Operations committee  Thank you for the question. As the honourable member mentioned, we now have a degree of flexibility for people who were affected involuntarily and who did not at that time have the necessary language level to be transferred to an available position. We put that flexibility in pl

Government Operations committee  Thank you for the question. I should clarify that the Public Service Commission is responsible for appointments under the Public Service Employment Act, so that would not include other Governor in Council appointments you mentioned. Any of the other GIC appointments are not gove

Government Operations committee  Yes. This was a change that was put in place, I think, in 2008 or 2009. My colleague, Madame Laurendeau, will clarify if I'm incorrect about that. As you said, after someone has worked as ministerial staff for a period of three years, and have ceased to remain a member of the min

Government Operations committee  Thank you very much. They generally relate to our oversight of the staffing system. We have an audit program whereby we audit each department on a seven-year cycle, and so we directly examine their staffing files and their systems and controls and procedures around staffing to

Government Operations committee  It goes back to 1908.

Government Operations committee  I can't give you the full history but I can say that in 2005 when the new act was put in place, I believe the independence of the commission was strengthened in some ways. If I could clarify for the purposes of our reporting to government on the use of our financial authorities t

Government Operations committee  In terms of our own organization, much of what the Public Service Commission does is internal to government. We of course have our oversight activities where we work with internal departments to audit and to conduct investigations in staffing activities. It depends, I guess, on h

Government Operations committee  It would not be part of my mandate, I'm afraid, to give the definition. From my experience, I consider back office costs certainly anything in the corporate service area—HR, finance, and those functions. We tend to consider those to be back office functions. Within each program,

Government Operations committee  The things that are being cut are the things that I mentioned at the beginning. We are closing two regional offices, amalgamating some management structures. We've closed our library and we resized our corporate service function. Having said that, I do acknowledge that we do cont

Government Operations committee  That is correct.

Government Operations committee  Thank you for the question. So yes, as you observe in the first part of your question, the rate of staffing overall in government is declining, and departments over the last seven years, since the new act was put into place, have been continually increasing their own departmenta

Government Operations committee  Thank you very much for your questions. We started planning for changes two years ago. We started a process to reallocate our budgets and our staff to make sure we had everything we needed for the system to work during the downsizing process and to support the workforce adjustme

Government Operations committee  Thank you very much for the question. We have made some changes to the priority system. Overall, the system is working better than before. That is helping the situation and slightly taking the pressure off our resources. I will ask Ms. Laurendeau to give you a brief overview of