Thank you to the Minister and the
staff for that answer. That’s the type of answer. It sounds like someone put some thought into it.
A number of Members are concerned about the approach we’ve used. Quite often that seems to be the answer that’s missed — how someone did some analysis on potential workload and where they can do this. That’s caused a lot of frustration and some pushback that not just this Minister but all those Ministers over there should be receiving so we get that type of detail.
The frustration we’re receiving here is that…. My fear is, the fear in the public — whether it’s the public service or just the people on the street — is…. The magic eight ball was approached on the fundamental process of going to find money within
a department. Should we eliminate a job? The answer is: only you will know.
That’s the type of answer I’d like on some of these, and I want to be assured that all the positions received that type of scrutiny to make sure we didn’t just tell somebody today, “We’re eliminating this position. And by the way, two seats over, you’re going to do all the work, whether you know it or not.” I think what happens is that we end up having fallout problems on top of this.
I’m running out of time here, but I certainly see there are issues as that falls out as well. I want to make sure that sort of a begin-with-the-end-in-mind approach happens with it. If you want to eliminate — go down from four positions to three…. I’m glad they’ve done some analysis to say, “Well, you know, we could spread the work out.” That was the answer I was hoping some thought had gone into.
Also, if I were a human resource specialist of some sort, my next fear in that area would be whether we have now burdened people with work they can or cannot do. On top of that, have we changed their job descriptions by now? Have we changed the phase of how we pay?
Those are other items. I’d certainly hope the Minister will have some feedback on that, to ensure we’ve done this from top to bottom, thinking it through.