Official Languages committee  I have shared with you my experience with my organization. I'm the chief administrative officer responsible for the Public Service Commission, so I've informed you about how we took on our responsibilities during the pandemic and, as part of the services we provide to departments—in our case, second language evaluation—how we were able to staff bilingual positions.

Official Languages committee  That's a very complex question, and I only have a few minutes to answer it. A few years ago, at the request of the Clerk of the Privy Council, I prepared a report with my colleague Matthew Mendelsohn. The report contained a number of recommendations aimed at improving linguistic duality in the public service.

Official Languages committee  I am not responsible for the bonus, but I have made my position on it clear in the report I have just mentioned. In my view, the money is not well spent because the bonus is being given to people who have already achieved the level of bilingualism required for their positions. It's a measure from 30 or 40 years ago that has never really been brought up to date.

Official Languages committee  I feel that those who want to learn a language would prefer well-funded language training.

Official Languages committee  That's a big question. Some of it is way beyond my area of responsibility. In our recruitment efforts obviously we're always looking for bilingual candidates in all regions of the country and hoping that departments will use our inventories, whether it's through student programs or graduate programs or people at mid-career with some capacity in both official languages, to hire to improve their capacity to be able to serve those local communities.

Official Languages committee  I sent the document in both languages. I hope it's been distributed to members.

Official Languages committee  I was talking about second-language interviews for oral proficiency. These interviews are administrated remotely by PSC assessors to candidates in their own homes. Over 5,000 virtual interviews have been administered this way. We also launched unsupervised Internet testing to evaluate second language reading and writing skills.

Official Languages committee  Mr. Chair, thank you for inviting my colleague Susan Dubreuil and I to appear before the committee today. I want to begin by acknowledging that we are on the unceded traditional territory of the Algonquin Anishinabe people. I would like to share what my organization has done to quickly adapt and to ensure that our obligations under the Official Languages Act were respected during the pandemic.

Government Operations committee  Pools can be an extremely useful tool if you know that a number of positions are going to become available. If there's a little uncertainty as to how many of those positions there might be, then you have, let's say, a dozen candidates in a pool, but that pool should be drawn as a priority because you've invested all of that time in creating it.

Government Operations committee  Yes, and that's one of the areas—

Government Operations committee  For example, we're providing guidance to departments on the appropriate use of pools. This is an area where, again, we're not directing but providing guidance. You're right.

Government Operations committee  The follow-up to the anonymized recruitment pilot project is a full audit of the progression of our employment equity groups, each group along the staffing system, from applications, screening, and assessment all the way to actual appointment. That study is currently under way. We're looking at hundreds of staffing actions to see what kind of trends we may get.

Government Operations committee  I think that's a broader issue—

Government Operations committee  That's a broader issue, the inside track that people have. That gets to getting the jargon out of some of the job advertisements, so that we use terms that people can relate to, rather than just the inside government folks. There's some work to be done there, for sure.

Government Operations committee  Preference.