I'll try to be brief, of course, as the chairperson would appreciate I'm sure. You always have to bear in mind that much of what is the underpinning of those two reports is confidential. Anything that does not appear in the report is still confidential.
With those limitations, essentially under the Public Servants Disclosure Protection Act the commissioner is appointed pursuant to that act. We were basically doing two things. They're still doing two things. Joe Friday, my successor, is responsible to receive complaints of wrongdoing and is responsible to receive allegations of reprisals for people who have disclosed wrongdoing in the past.
There is a provision in the act that says that if somebody wishes to lodge a complaint of wrongdoing that relates to the operation of the office itself, the Office of the Public Sector Integrity Commissioner of Canada, the Auditor General is responsible to handle these things. In other words, the Auditor General does exactly what the office would be doing vis-à-vis complaints made against other organizations. It's as a result of two distinct complaints, these investigations were launched by the Auditor General under the Public Servants Disclosure Protection Act.
When I was appointed there—I said in 2011, and in fact I started on December 14, 2010—it was a few days after a scathing report, as journalists usually put it, by the Auditor General, in which the former Auditor General, Madam Fraser, basically.... I recall precisely what she said. She said she had absolutely no confidence in any policy or procedure that this office had been using in making determinations since its creation. She was recommending very strongly that the new commissioner essentially review each and every one of the 228 files that had been dealt with at that point in time in late 2010.
When I arrived as interim commissioner from a short period in the private sector—I did retire in 2009 and came back on December 14, 2010 as interim commissioner—I was faced with the situation that there was a 50% vacancy rate in the office. We did not actually know how many pending files there were because there was no system whatsoever. We had to attend to a number of things. We had a profound morale problem as well.
In terms of what the Auditor General dealt with in 2012-13 in these two complaints, I admit that we dropped these two balls essentially. I did not dispute the conclusion. The context was very difficult. My responsibility was that of a leader. I was not personally blamed for something I had done myself, but we had an investigator who basically had serious difficulties at that point in time with hundreds of days of unplanned absences. That was a factor as well, as I said in my response in the report.
It was an unfortunate combination of factors that led to these two reports having come to that conclusion. We did not do the work as we should have done it, but it was taking place in the middle of a crisis, essentially, involving hundreds of other files as well.