Thank you very much.
This is a subject that greatly interests me. I asked the witnesses who made presentations a number of questions about it. I was also very interested in what was happening at Rights and Democracy and the saga that was going on there for a number of months, if not more than a year. The organization had earned its spurs, had established its credibility on the international scene in the geopolitical reality of 1988. That geopolitical reality has evolved, of course, but the organization has always managed to adapt.
There were a number of people in charge. I know that, in the House today, Ms. Laverdière mentioned Jean-Louis Roy, who was one of the organization's CEOs. I had the opportunity to meet him and have discussions with him. He confirmed that the organization continued to have a very good reputation until the arrival of a new board of directors, made up of people parachuted in by the federal government. That is when the problems started.
One of the witnesses, the chair of the board, said that the organization was badly run. When I asked him about that allegation, I reminded him that board members had asked Deloitte & Touche to do a management audit of the organization from 2005 to 2009. That was the period during which the management provided by Mr. Beauregard and the staff of Rights and Democracy was alleged to have been bad. I told him that the report cost a little under $1 million, as I understand it, an amount that represented the entirety of the consultations that the board of directors undertook.
The board of directors sat on the report for more than five months. The witness tried to convince me, with no success, that the report was devastating for Mr. Beauregard's administration. If you read the report, you see that there was no evidence of poor administration in the organization. Anyone who has read the report, as I have, can see that clearly. Mr. Brown's arguments have done nothing to convince me of the opposite. I also recommend that the people watching us on television and who want to know more about this read the excellent series of articles that Paul Wells wrote for Maclean's magazine at the time. They provide a very good history and chronology of the situation.
It was after 2009, that is, after the appointment of the board members, that the problems really started and that Rights and Democracy began to skid out of control. Some staff members left and Mr. Beauregard worked passionately and energetically to defend the organization for which he worked. But, at the end of the day, Rights and Democracy, a credible, worthy organization that represented Canada well on the international scene, gradually became nothing more than an empty shell.
Division 33 of Bill C-38 does away with the organization. I do not have to tell you that I find this to be regrettable in the extreme. We will remember Rights and Democracy as an organization that, for a very long time, had succeeded in projecting a very respectable image of Canada as a country that makes attempts at conciliation on the world stage. That image is gradually fading away. As a consequence, we are going to make a final gesture in this committee by voting against the proposed changes to division 33 that will eliminate Rights and Democracy for ever.