Thank you, Mr. Chair. When we are dealing with a competition or a competitive process to where we are hiring an individual, we follow the Affirmative Action Policy. Where we have qualified candidates, we screen them in; we put them through the appropriate process, to which we would determine whether they meet our expected criteria. At that point in time, we would hire them. As I indicated earlier, in one of these instances we had a party, one candidate, who met that qualification standard and in the other one the second person was not an affirmative action candidate.
What I can say that would provide a little more information around this is: when we are running term positions, we have a much lower number of applicants on those competitions. Most people who are looking for indeterminate work, they are not going to submit an application in many cases for what they would consider a term employment. They like that benefit of having indeterminate status, and so we do not get the number of candidates, nor do we get sometimes the quality of candidates in those situations. I think that led to a very low number of applicants during the initial process, so we did not have many at that point in time. I actually sat on the board whenever we did the hiring of those positions, and the numbers were much lower than we had anticipated. We had actually some decent numbers in a couple of the regions, but they were much lower in others. That is one of the limitations from running term competitions.
When it comes to an affected employee, as the Minister pointed out, when someone goes through the process to where their funding or in this case the funding for their position was then running out, we have to deal with them as an affected employee under the Public Service Act, and so that takes a very different approach. From that standpoint, we utilize the provisions under that Public Service Act. I can say we did utilize the services of human resources. I reached out personally to the regional superintendent, and we walked through what was happening. In that situation, they provided us with very good advice through the process, to which we arrived at the outcome that we were. Thank you, Mr. Chair.