Thank you for the question.
As the minister said, there has been an approval process for scientific publications by the department for a long time, since the 1970s. The minister also said that there was a slight change in the procedures related to this process in one of our regions, because of a report by the auditor general.
I will continue in English.
The Auditor General's report in 2009 said that a number of departments, including the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, were not taking sufficient action to adequately protect intellectual property. So we looked at our procedures, and our procedures did not make it clear in this one region that the approval process applies both when our scientist is the primary or the sole author of a document and when our scientist is a secondary author. There may be intellectual property that we need to protect. The adjustment is to ensure that this is taking place.
So it is a small adjustment in the procedure. As the minister has said, the practice of approval—which takes place within the science sector, it should be noted—has been longstanding.