Mr. Chairman, certainly in fairness to the people who work there…. Looking at the vacant positions, I agree with this, but I don’t think that’s going far enough. I think, again, it comes back to this issue of program review and looking at the effectiveness and efficiency of the methods by which we deliver those programs. One hundred and twenty people in headquarters is a lot of positions. I guess I’m just concerned about doing things the same old way and kind of status quo, and when a reduction target comes up, it’s not looked at in that in-depth way that a program review or maybe an outside objective set of eyes would look at the path that’s performed. Maybe I am not doing a very good job of describing this.
It doesn’t seem like people from within the department themselves would necessarily have any incentive or motivation at looking at how they could do the same function and do it with more efficiency and less people. I mean, what incentive do people have to do that? So we get an external target reduction and you say, “Oh, we’ve got some vacant
positions; let’s offer that up.” That seems very shallow to me. In the Alberta government they used to have one deputy minister, who had a nickname, who would go around and be put in a department and look for every efficiency possible. People knew that when that deputy came to their department, they were looking at streamlining operations and saving money.
I don’t know if it would take something like this to get those kinds of results. I mean, as a Member I’m all about wanting to do things in a cost-effective and efficient way, and what I’m seeing here, very much, is the status quo.
Can the Minister provide me with any assurance that he as a leader and being at the helm of this department has any creative or innovative ideas of how the Department of Human Resources could be better managed?