Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Mr. Ricard, thank you for the work that you do.
I'm new to Parliament and spent my career in the private sector. I think the role of auditor is misunderstood, particularly with performance audits. We would welcome performance audits as a source of improving operations and trying to get better as a company, and I think the same thing should happen with government.
My concern here, and it's head-scratching to me, is that we're undertaking this volume of program spending and we haven't included sufficient capital for the auditors to do their jobs and make sure taxpayers' dollars have been well spent. This is a concern particularly to your comments about ensuring that, if we got into a situation like this again, we would understand better whether these programs work or not.
For you, as a career auditor, it must strike you that.... As someone said, it's a rounding error. For the life of me, I can't understand it. Forget about the past; we're in it today. With $200-billion worth of spending, surely we should have more comprehensive audits at this time.