On November 15, 2002, the Auditor General wrote to the then minister, the Honourable Herb Dhaliwal, to talk about some of the issues regarding the inconsistent application of quality assurance processes. One of the comments was that from 1999 to 2001, internal and external audits of QA identified numerous weaknesses in AECL's QA processes, the most serious being in the MAPLE reactor project.
Mr. Dhaliwal, in his interview this year, said that they actually set up a process whereby they were evaluating their different options. He said that unfortunately he had left politics while they were looking at this, and final decisions were not being made. “[W]e did have a process in place to make those decisions. People who came on later decided it was not a priority; only they can answer for that.”
Was there any priority put on this from 2002 on?