Thank you. I'll leave that topic of diamond guarantees and the secondary diamond industry. I just want to offer some comments about the consolidation of the human resources function of the government. I want to put on record, Mr. Chairman, that I do support this initiative that the government is engaged in, largely due to the desire that I have for better and more effective functioning of management of human resources and not in any way as a cost-cutting measure. I think it's important for the people out there to know that really this was never engaged as a cost-cutting measure.

I hear this on the street and because of other developments that we have been hearing around the North, that they're having some parties whose interest it was to actually interpret it this way. I'm hoping that with the consolidation and regionalization -- because it's not a consolidation of all the services at headquarters -- there will be some rationalization making the services more centralized to a few locations so that there could be some expertise built in an area that is quite complex and difficult.

I'm hoping that this would reduce the instances of all these phone calls that I've been receiving for the last couple of years from people who are not able to get their pension file sorted out, or their records of employment provided to them in a timely manner. These are rules about pension and insurance and employee benefits; all that stuff. It's very complicated, and people need to do enough of it to get that kind of training and concentration of work to build up that expertise. You don't want to see your pension files screwed up. Sorry for that language.

I believe in decentralization and creating job opportunities in communities, but we do that in areas that make sense and there are things that make better sense. For example, the business services section of the government should be in communities. But this is about managing human resources for the government. I'm hoping that this will really serve the public service well. Also, once this gets centralized, I look for things like a better hiring policy that looks at the government-wide approach; that there's a better management program and management training program for the civil servants so that there's upward mobility and there are training opportunities for the employees of the government, and that there's better succession planning.

We know that the demographics show that a large part of baby boomers are going to retire in the next five or 10 years. We also know that the government is not the most coveted employer of the North anymore. We have to fight with other industries to get the best people possible, and I don't see that there is as good a human resource management plan as we could have. I would like to see better implementation and action on affirmative action. I would like to see more women in senior management, and all those questions you have about human resource management of the government right now are spread out everywhere and no one person or no one Minister is accountable for who is hired to do the work that we do.

As MLAs, we get lots of questions from people who didn't get the job that they thought they should get. There are affirmative action candidates who didn't get an interview and such. So this is part of larger work that I think needed to be done, to make sure that we have a concentrated effort to manage our human resources better.

Having said that though, I think we have to always remember that we are talking about people's jobs. People don't like changes and there is always a better way to do these things. One of the most important things about this is communication. I understand, from what I know so far, that this is at a very initial stage. But I'm already hearing rumblings out there, there are people who are hearing that they're going to lose their job or that they're not being told enough about what is happening. In going through the main estimates, we have witnessed and we have seen that each department is at a different stage in terms of how this is going to get done. There are some departments that have been told that there are five or six positions under human resources in their department that are going to move. Some people think it will move this April, some people think they're going to move six months from now, some people think that they're all going to move with this transfer, and some people think they're going to lose their jobs. Some people have already been given lay-off notices. When you're talking about people's jobs, it's really important, because we cannot do this work without the support and understanding and input and the buy-in from the people who are affected.

So that's just a short statement on my support for what's going on in principle, but just to assert, once again, that there's a right way to do it, a wrong way to do it, there's a wrong way to do it, there's a better way to do it, and there's a poor way to do it. Could I ask the Minister, for the record -- I don't know if he's had a chance to say what's going on -- just to state what's going on with this transfer and what the employees should be expected to understand about it? Thank you, Mr. Chairman.