Bob McLeod

Mr. Chair, I think it's important for the Member to recognize that the responsibility for management and dealing with human resources is held jointly with the departmental senior managers. The departments have been delegated authority to do all of the hiring and staffing, and the Department of HR provides services to departments. So, as such, the departments have authority to make those kinds of decisions, and we provide services and facilitate the human resource functions.

Certainly we have a number of different approaches we would like to take. What we are starting to realize is that it’s becoming harder and harder for us to staff HR positions with people with HR backgrounds. We are finding we have to spend more time in training. We want to focus more on working with the departments that have the delegated authority to hire. So we want to work more closely with them so we provide better service levels. We had to pull some services that were done at the regions into headquarters in order to deal with some processing problems or issues. We want to spend more time...

We have the Staff Retention Policy. The whole reason for having that is to try to keep affected employees with the government, and the Affirmative Action Policy applies to that as well. So we’ll take every step to try to keep those employees and reassign them.

That’s correct, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Chair, we provide human resource services out of all of the offices. Some may not provide as many services as others, depending on the location. Generally, the larger regional centres are full service, but the smaller ones may not be as full service.

The discussion’s in Cabinet.

The total amount of the chargeback to HR is $628,000.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. With me I have on my left Sharilyn Alexander, acting deputy minister of Human Resources, and on my right I have Shaleen Woodward, the director of Human Resources Strategy.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I think it’s important for the Member to understand that the Department of HR is a service department. The departments make the decisions on hiring and staffing. We provide service. We give advice and recommendations, and that’s the whole purpose of the Department of HR.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I understand the Premier already addressed this and provided a response at a number of meetings with the standing committees. He also talked about it yesterday in question period. I think that would be sufficient.