Here's what happened. As I understand it, it is a requirement. There may be some discussion about what actually constitutes a debriefing. At the point of contract award, we got a one-page letter from the department saying the contract had been awarded to CGI; our score was this, their score was that, and they were not having debriefings. That's what the first letter said.
So I wrote back with a bunch of detailed questions that I wanted answered and a request for documents. They didn't answer any of the questions, and they said I had to go through access to information.
Then IBM, which had also lost, sent in a request for more information, and they told me they did get some of the documents they asked for. So I wrote back yet again--this would have been in late November or early December--asking why they wouldn't give us the documents when they had given them to IBM, and saying that we wanted these documents and we wanted a face-to-face debriefing. I didn't hear back on that one at all.
Let me qualify that. They may have replied in late February, after more things were blowing up, but certainly for three months we heard nothing.
The reason given by Minister Fortier in this meeting--that is, because it was before the courts--was new to me. Nobody had told me that. Nobody came back and said we couldn't have a debriefing because we were in front of the CITT. As it evolved, the last of the CITT issues was settled probably in January, and there was still no debriefing.