Mr. Chairman, Members of the Committee, I am pleased to be here this evening. The Canada Health Infoway is unique. Its aim, through its mandate and its structure, is to promote the development of electronic health records in a pan-Canadian context, so as to improve the quality, access and productivity of our health care system.
Infoway was established as an independent not-for-profit corporation as set out under the Canada Corporations Act. Infoway is not a parent crown corporation or a wholly owned subsidiary of a parent crown corporation or an agent corporation. Infoway reflects a collaborative model, which is defined in its governing body membership, its board of directors, and its joint strategic investor role and structure.
Infoway's investment model is designed to foster collaboration with all jurisdictional stakeholders while ensuring reuse, high replication, and leverage of the funds that are invested. As a strategic investor, Infoway co-invests on average 75% of eligible costs for electronic health record projects. Infoway uses a gated funding mechanism so that no money flows until key milestone deliverables are achieved. It is the provinces and the territories that are responsible for the longer-term maintenance and operating costs; hence they have a huge stake in the development and implementation of these systems.
Canada's 14 federal, provincial, and territorial governments, represented by their deputy ministers of health, are the corporation's owners and, in a manner of speaking, its only shareholders. The cooperation and collaboration of each member is required on an equal basis. While each member has an oversight role in Infoway, no individual government has a priority oversight role. Infoway's strong accountability regime reflects our multi-government structure and ownership. It includes an annual independent compliance audit to ensure conformity and adherence to specific terms and conditions of our funding agreement, which is submitted to all members; an annual independent financial audit, which is made available to the members and to the public; an annual report, which has been tabled in the House, that tracks performance results and is provided to all members of Parliament, the Senate, and is available on our website along with our annual business plan, which is approved by the board of directors and presented to the members. In addition, a mid-term performance evaluation has recently been completed by an independent third party evaluation firm, and that extensive report was submitted to the members as well as being made available to the public.
In closing, as the Auditor General stated in her appearance here last week, changes last year to the Auditor General Act addressed her concerns about the audit access to foundations and this proposed legislation, which would expand that office's mandate to follow the dollar. Infoway members, board, and management also take following the dollar very seriously and have put in place a strong accountability framework with appropriate internal controls, processes, procedures, financial systems, external investment portfolio managers, external audit and performance evaluation mechanisms to account for all of our investment decisions and the tracking of expenditures of these investment dollars.
We would obviously seek to fully cooperate with the Auditor General in any audit activity that she might wish to initiate and hope that her office could and would build on the audit and accountability activities Infoway has already established.
Thank you.