Government Operations committee  The $1.2-million difference you are seeing in the main estimates comes solely from money allocated for creating a case management system. That system is supposed to allow and facilitate request management and the processing of submitted cases. That's all the money was intended for.

Government Operations committee  Yes, precisely.

Government Operations committee  Allow me to answer. As I explained earlier, the decision goes back to 2006. It was based on the idea that departments should take responsibility for their employees’ language training to better meet their needs. When all the funding used to be centralized, language training was not necessarily related to needs stemming from departmental business or activities.

Government Operations committee  I want to clarify that there will be a net reduction.

Government Operations committee  Perhaps Sally should do that.

Government Operations committee  The decision that was made was to transfer the responsibility of providing second-language training to each individual department. So it was decided that a limited and decreasing number of instructors would be kept at the Canada School of Public Service for a specific period of time.

Government Operations committee  Thank you, minister. I appreciate the member's question. The Treasury Board Secretariat's budget is indeed undergoing a net reduction of $192 million. I believe that is the figure you are referring to. Vote 1, which represents the department's operating expenditures, entails a net reduction of $11.3 million, most of which stems from the strategic review applicable to the department.

Government Operations committee  Thank you, Minister. The Regulatory Cooperation Council is engaged actively with about 20 departments and agencies and their counterparts in the United States. The funds are used to support the secretariat and the development of the action plan. And now the plans are actually going to be brought forward and discussed with the key industries or stakeholders on the components that need to be moved forward.

Government Operations committee  Thank you. It's a question of how you interpret the information. For example, the question on personnel costs that was asked earlier is shown in the PBO's report as though there were no components to it, whereas when we look at the numbers, we unpack them and see them from estimate to estimate and look at the purpose.

Government Operations committee  Thank you, minister. I believe the centre receives the bulk of its funding under the roadmap. The centre of expertise was set up with that in mind. It receives an annual budget of approximately $3 million.

Government Operations committee  I can be fast, if that's okay. Thank you for the question. There is a one-time $1.3 billion increase, which is to cover the elimination of severance, and we allowed under the agreement that we had negotiated with a number of bargaining agents for employees to avail themselves of that.

Government Operations committee  Alright. As the minister said, we have two directives in place, and they are well-known to employees; they address the responsibilities of managers as well as the responsibilities and rights of employees. It is important to understand that none of the decisions contained in the budget will be known until it is tabled.

Government Operations committee  There's very little in vote 10. There's about $10 million left.

Government Operations committee  It has been used in the past when initiatives such as Government Online, for example, are established. In this case, vote 10 was used to transfer funds to government departments. You can use supplementary estimates or estimates processes, or you can use allocations from central votes, but the description of the central votes is actually on page 147 of the supplementary estimates.

Government Operations committee  Yes, it's across government—but we use that very infrequently. It is a vote that can be used for those initiatives, but is very seldom used because we tend to want to actually have the amounts ascribed to each of the operating votes of each department, because that is a cleaner reporting mechanism.