Thank you, Mr. Speaker. As a government, our greatest resource, our greatest asset is our human resources and it’s very important for us to make sure that we have a qualified public service in order to do all the work that we need them to do.
The Member is correct that our public service is aging. The average age is 44 years old. That’s the average age of our public service. Sixty-three percent of our employees are over 40 years old. Obviously we need to pay a lot of attention to succession planning. Specifically in the senior management category, over the next five years 40 percent of our senior management cohort is eligible to retire, and over 10 years 54 percent of our senior managers are eligible to retire as well. Obviously, we have a big job ahead of us.
Our Human Resource Strategic Plan identified the need for our government to develop a Succession Planning Strategy, and we're working very hard on that right now.