Commissioner decommissioned?

It has been more than a month and a half since the Globe and Mail reported that CSE Commissioner Peter Cory was resigning his position, just three months after having accepted the job (blog post here), and still there is no official word on his status. No confirmation, no denial, no appointment of a successor.

Ottawa, in its ongoing effort to be as inscrutable as Stalin's Politburo, has apparently decided to leave us all guessing.

Even the G&M's article has been pulled from free public access.

But now, perhaps, we have been favoured with a sign. It seems that Justice Cory has also largely disappeared from the Office of the Communications Security Establishment Commissioner website. Apart from his official bio, the only place he now appears on the site is on a list of Former Commissioners on the OCSEC History page.

Judging from that subtle indication, it would appear that he is indeed leaving the post. Presumably he has agreed to keep it quiet until Ottawa appoints his successor.

So... Can we get on with it? Hmm?

March 2010 CSE staff size

1752.

(If you click through on the link and get a different figure, it's probably because the Canada Public Service Agency has updated its website; they update the numbers once a month.)

Related:

New figures are now available on CSE's personnel plans for the next few years (source: DND 2010-11 Report on Plans and Priorities):

Forecast for the fiscal year just ended: 1658 civilian full-time equivalents (FTEs).
Planned for 2010-11: 1762 FTEs
Planned for 2011-12: 1817 FTEs
Planned for 2012-13: 1825 FTEs

More growth to come?

CSE is anticipating that a staff of some 2250 will occupy its new headquarters upon its completion in 2015 (if I read the runes aright), but that figure includes both government employees, which could include some military personnel as well as CSE civilians, and an unspecified number of contractors, so the final target figure for CSE's civilian employees remains unclear.

There also could be some variation between the actual number of employees and FTEs. For example, the monthly figures I've been reporting on this site average out to 1699 over the last fiscal year, whereas the FTE forecast for the same period is only 1658.