Thank you, Chair.
Good morning, Mr. Pushor.
When you appeared before this committee last April, you told us that a third party had been commissioned to conduct an independent investigation. Nine months on, the report has, of course, been published. It’s a fairly short report, 14 pages long, and it only examined the communication processes relating to the incident. The mandate was quite narrow. It wasn’t a broad mandate. In addition, Deloitte was unable to question employees of Alberta’s energy regulator to find out where these problems began.
Essentially, what stands out in the report is what it fails to mention. We understand from it that there were no procedures in place to determine whether it was an incident or an emergency, that there was no clear communications protocol, and that things were done in a somewhat haphazard, if not ad hoc, manner. Deloitte concluded in its report that Alberta’s energy regulator complied with its requirements, but compliance was easily achieved, since requirements were minimal.
Hiring a third party like Deloitte, a company that will do business with you again and is not independent, suggests that you were not prepared to accept the results of a real investigation, where transparency and rigour would have been essential to get to the root of the problem.
Why did you decide to give Deloitte such a highly circumscribed and narrow mandate? Why didn’t you choose to mandate a retired judge or a quasi-judicial commission, for example? Why mandate a company with which you will, in all likelihood, do business again?