Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I'm going to follow up on Monsieur Caron's line of questioning because Saudi Arabia has always been a challenge. There are not common values, but there is often very aligned mutual interests. On August 3 of last year, a tweet in Arabic from the embassy in Riyadh led to a crisis with that country on a diplomatic level. In fact, the outgoing former ambassador, Ambassador Horak, called the tweet “a serious overreaction”. By the end of August, your department was advising of major trade disruptions with that country.
Last fall, throughout September, October and November, SNC-Lavalin met with Michael Wernick, Bill Morneau, Ben Chin, Elder Marques and Mathieu Bouchard. That's quite well known now in Canada. Over that period, the largest company hit by the disruption was SNC-Lavalin. In fact, the CEO said that diplomatic tensions, in his words from that tweet, were “hurting the company's bottom line”, so much so that material statements were made publicly, because it's a publicly traded company. A few months ago, they estimated that the losses attributable to that tweet and the dispute at $1.1 billion for SNC-Lavalin.
While there were discussions about the DPA with SNC-Lavalin, were you involved in any discussions about the diplomatic dispute that was costing them billions?