In fact, it was supposed to be independent of the government, so yes, it was a purely civil service process.
At the end of the day, the story about the Trudeau Foundation that there was a meeting in 2014—according to an anonymous source given to The Globe and Mail—where somebody apparently said to this donor, “Give money to the Trudeau Foundation and we'll pay you back”, actually came out on February 28.
I submitted my report before the end of the year, and there was no issue. As I said, I wasn't examining election interference per se; I was examining whether this protocol worked, whether the right people were talking to the right people and whether the standard in the protocol actually made sense because the nature of the problem of foreign interference continued to evolve from the time the protocol was first set up.