David Ramsay

Thank you, Mr. Minister. Ms. Lee.

Thank you, Mr. Minister. We will now go to Education, Culture and Employment, CAP-17, total advanced education and careers, $3.749 million.

Thank you for that detail, Mr. Minister. Ms. Lee.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thanks to the Minister for answering that question. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. My comments are similar to the ones Ms. Lee had. We spoke about this when we went through this a few weeks back, but I will bring it up again in this setting. Can we ask the Minister to go department by department and provide this committee with some information on how many employees the government has in terms of HR function in each department, and what it costs this government and each department to deliver that function? I would like to get a handle on that in terms of what the numbers are and what it is costing the way we are operating today. I do agree that I...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, I move we report progress.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thanks for that explanation, Mr. Minister. I do have some difficulty though, especially given the fact that some of our larger government departments would have vacancy rates upwards of 10 percent. That being the case, we’re talking about some pretty significant dollars that are associated with those vacant positions. I do agree with you that, yes, departments and managers need to be able to have some flexibility and have to have some room to manoeuvre inside their departments, but if the money that is earmarked for positions isn’t spent on the positions I have some...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Yes, Mr. Minister, I am in receipt of that letter and the accompanying information that was with it. The question that I have though, in the information that you provided it just goes based on actual expenditures and not an actual budgeted amount. I know travel a lot of times is a difficult thing to gauge. Your needs might change over the course of the year and people might need to travel when they weren’t supposed to. I’m just wondering, what I was looking for was budgeted amounts, not actual expenditures. Working off of budgeted amounts it’s a lot easier to see the...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I agree wholeheartedly with Ms. Lee and her line of questioning on this. Having been my first time through this budget process, we didn’t have the benefit of going through the business planning cycle before we went through the draft mains; but, as a new Member, it’s very confusing. I found a lot of unanswered questions. The term “other expenses” is fairly open to interpretation.

Two of the things I’d like to see come out of this exercise and maybe budgets in the future, I’d like to see -- and I spoke of this in the House yesterday -- the travel budget broken out by...

Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thanks, Mr. Minister, for the response. I guess we could do that, we could start asking each department what the HR component is in their department. So I will ask you, Mr. Minister, for the Department of Executive, maybe we could get some figures in terms of what the HR component is in his department. Thank you.