Am I allowed to refer to a document here?
It's standard practice that you clearly set out the scope of the activity, your mandate, what is being sought, and the direction your activity is going to go. You agree in advance to the methodologies that are going to be used to determine how this is going to be done. You familiarize yourself with the work practices and the activities of the client. In this sense, since it was the Government of Canada, with which both Mr. Bird and I have considerable experience, it wasn't a question of learning about the operation of the machinery of government or international investigations. It was using the accepted practices with respect to ensuring the main objective and sticking to fact-based findings, avoiding speculation. In effect, you can substantiate with a
supporting document
one way or another.
I'm jumping ahead here, in effect. Then once you've actually gathered the information from all the different sources, whether those are open sources, data communications, fax logs, telephone logs, BlackBerry logs, or several thousand pages of electronic data, which is reviewed and analyzed and timelined, then you prepare your report.
I must say, sir, the easiest thing in the world is to prepare the report once the timeline is concluded. The timeline is the bugbear of everything. The timeline establishes what can be in the report.
You do that, and then in the case of BMCI, once we've done that, there's the quality assurance process during which the president makes sure that every statement we have in that document can be backed up by a primary source of one nature or another. It could be an interview note. It could be a newspaper article, Associated Press information, or whatever. But every statement in that report must be capable of being backed up by some substantiating document.