Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Congratulations on your recent nomination to the chair of this very important committee.
We prepared some slides and submitted them to the committee in preparation for our appearance today. I encourage you to keep them as reference tools for my office's mandate.
To maximize the time for questions from the committee, Mr. Hayes and I will cover only the highlights of our presentation.
I will start by discussing the activities of our office, which are presented on slides 8 to 11. More than half of our financial auditors are involved in annual audits of financial statements of the Government of Canada and the three territories. This also includes annual audits of several Crown corporations. In these audits, we express an opinion on the financial position on the basis of accounting standards.
We also perform special examinations, which are actually performance audits, but within a Crown corporation. The law requires a special examination at least once every 10 years in all parent Crown corporations.
The audits that Parliament is most familiar with are performance audits. These audits look at whether government programs are managed with due regard to economy, efficiency and the environment. We also look at whether there are measures in place to determine if programs are effective. This is commonly referred to as auditing the four Es.
We may comment on policy implementation in our performance audit, but we will not comment on policy itself.
The commissioner of the environment and sustainable development assists me in the areas of my mandate when they relate to the environment and sustainable development. All of our performance audit work, whether it is issued under the banner of the Auditor General or the commissioner of the environment, follows the same planning, execution and selection processes, and we have the same standards for quality.
Many of our performance auditors enjoy the mobility of working on any one of our performance audit products.
I'll now hand it over to Andrew, the interim commissioner of the environment and sustainable development. He can discuss some of the other work we do with respect to sustainable development strategies and the petitions process.