Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, again, Ms. Fraser, for appearing today, and thank you for appearing yesterday.
I'd like to pick up on your opening comment, if I could, just to explore your own clarification about yesterday. You can imagine there are an awful lot of shell-shocked Canadians. Madame Gélinas has been I think judged to be one of the best Commissioners of the Environment and Sustainable Development that the country might have aspired to, held in the highest of regard I think by all parties, and, I'm assuming from your own comments, by yourself.
I think she has demonstrated a very even-handed approach to the delicate charge she has, responsibilities. In a sense, she's lived beyond the expectations of the original conception of the commissioner's office, which we as a government introduced a decade ago, and she has really held successive governments' feet to the fire, so to speak, our previous government and this government, and I think did quite a knockout job.
It was very, very kind of you to come yesterday and give us a heads-up, as you described it, with respect to what you were going to be announcing in the afternoon, but I do want to explore a little bit only because Canadians are confused. They'd like a better answer, perhaps, or a better idea of what has transpired here, and it does relate directly to the appointment of the interim Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development.
In your own press release that was issued yesterday there was talk about Madame Gélinas leaving, if I recall the words—you'll forgive me, I don't have the press release in front of me—“to pursue other opportunities”. Five or six hours later, most of us received a second press release, from Madame Gélinas herself, indicating that in fact she was surprised that she was, I guess, effectively terminated and that this was being made public sooner than she had expected it to be, and that negotiations or discussions had gone on for some time between herself and your office, and so on and so forth.
Could you help us understand, given the media reports that our chair cited just moments ago, some of the discrepancies between both your press releases and also perhaps some of the comments that are now public that were in the four-page document presented to this committee yesterday about the performance of the commissioner? Help us, please, understand what has transpired here so that we can work together to move to improve the functioning of that office and its structure and the role it ought to be playing, and perhaps an accentuated role that it ought to be playing going forward.