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With the departure Thursday of Judy Foote due to health and family concerns, the Liberal government must now choose a new minister to stickhandle one of its more complicated departments.

Foote’s two-year-long tenure as the minister in charge of Public Services and Procurement Canada was unexpectedly rough. There appears to be reason to hope, however, that the worst is now behind the department on several information-technology fronts.

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By the fall of 2018, for instance, it’s possible the government could finally see the back end of the Phoenix Pay fiasco. Phoenix is shorthand for the $310-million project that was to have consolidated and modernized pay systems used by more than 100 departments and agencies — thereby saving the government $70 million annually.

The transformation was to have been complete by early 2016. But when project administrators sacked hundreds of pay administrators in advance of the initial rollout, the backlog of pay transactions ballooned out of control — creating misery for government employees who had to go without a salary for weeks on end.