National Defence committee  I'm going to defer to Brian to answer that question. Having been here only four months, I have not been around long enough to detect patterns.

National Defence committee  I'm not quite sure how to answer. To be very transparent, to my knowledge, I'm not sure that my predecessors have asked for a budget increase in previous years, so I cannot say that requests were denied. However, I do think we need some flexibility built into our budget to address sui generis situations, making sure we don't waste money but making sure that we have access to money when we need it.

National Defence committee  At this point we have to keep it in-house for a whole host of reasons that I won't go into but are in our budget submission. If you would like me to expand, I can.

National Defence committee  It's more affordable. It's more secure. For a number of reasons, yes, it is more affordable and secure.

National Defence committee  I would like to add to that. Because both of our organizations are so small—I don't mean to speak on your behalf—one of the challenges we have is contingency funding. That's for either sharp increases or sharp bumps that may or may not be sustained; for complex cases that may arise out of the ordinary; or for cases where there may be a need to finance or fund legal services for a judicial review.

National Defence committee  Without commenting on the reason why—because I haven't done a full analysis—I will say there's no question that our office has been seeing a consistently increasing caseload. I stand to be corrected, but I believe we are approximately 50% over last year, and I believe the year before there was an increase.

National Defence committee  Up until several months ago—and Brian has the institutional memory here—our IT services were contracted out. Now we've moved towards an in-house capability. We have two people in-house, and they're keeping the system together for now. We've already requested equipment, which we were able to do in this budget year, so we expect that quite shortly we'll be upgraded.

National Defence committee  Insofar as the act under which we operate is concerned, I don't think we've had a systemic problem with a disrespect for the delays the act imposes. I will hand it over to Brian Radford to expand on that.

National Defence committee  Thank you for the opportunity. I was actually pretty close to the end. I was just going to mention some of the process for referring cases of reprisal to the tribunal. For the most part, everything was touched upon.

National Defence committee  I will just add that conciliation and mediation are important tools to optimize outcomes for the parties, and we have thus far funded 24 successful conciliations. I thank you for your time.

National Defence committee  Good afternoon, everyone. Mr. Chair, I appreciate the opportunity to provide information on the federal public sector's external whistle-blowing regime. The Office of the Public Sector Integrity Commissioner of Canada was created in 2007 under the Public Servants Disclosure Protection Act as part of a federal government accountability initiative.