Government Operations committee  The difference here is that leading up to the Phoenix implementation, as we've heard, departments were getting ready, I'll say cleaning up and getting the information out, and that happened in a fairly short time. It wasn't an ongoing normal process. It just came in at the end.

Government Operations committee  There are several ways. As I think I said, when I first joined I met with the five heads of unions, and we decided that two of the representatives would meet with me on a regular basis. We did that with two of the union representatives for about four or five weeks. More recently,

Government Operations committee  Yes, it was in April. My first meeting with the five heads of unions was on April 25, I believe. At that point, what I was looking for was to get the information they were hearing so that we could feed it into the system. That's why we were ready to establish some lines of comm

Government Operations committee  Just to be precise, the $15 million to $20 million is for the one-off costs, like the satellite centre, the call centre—

Government Operations committee  This would be on top. Also, we're looking at how we can work differently, either with partner enhancements.... We might have additional costs there, remembering again that the savings that were supposed to occur this year were in the order of $70 million, and in every year from n

Government Operations committee  Yes. Maybe I'll let Mr. Liddy walk you through it.

Government Operations committee  I will say to you that the one part where I want us to focus more attention, or to drill down, is really on that portion of it—I'll call it the “onboarding”. I talked about the students, but it's not just the students—and really getting to the bottom of whether there are other th

Government Operations committee  We believe these figures are realistic.

Government Operations committee  First of all, we now know how many people need to speak with someone at the pay centre. As Mr. Liddy mentioned, before Tuesday, we didn't even know that some people were trying to call, because their calls weren't getting through. Going forward, everyone should be able to speak w

Government Operations committee  That's right.

Government Operations committee  Yes, we now know the exact number of calls and the wait times. As I said earlier, the response time is under four minutes. That is a considerable improvement.

Government Operations committee  What I can tell you at this time is that discussions are ongoing, as we speak, between Treasury Board and the union. People are seized with this. There's a real desire to be able to share a process very quickly, but I don't have a date. I believe it will be imminent, because it i

Government Operations committee  The people doing the work have been very diligent. The figures we have given you include our predictions and the number of people who will be in the various centres. We wanted to divide up the work to figure out how to get it all done. Each centre has been given specific transact

Government Operations committee  We established the categories and the timeline you see here relatively recently, actually, after analyzing the scope of the backlog and deciding to create temporary units to deal with the problem. As I said earlier, we believe it is unacceptable that people aren't getting paid.

Government Operations committee  Yes, that's possible.