I don't want to get into too much detail about that unfortunate chapter in our country's history, but from a procedural point of view, it is important to make a distinction between what happened with the sponsorship issue and what is happening here.
With the sponsorship issue, in fact, the first big problem was that it bypassed the public service completely. It was simply a political fund that was set up. As I recall, and I was on the public accounts committee, when the deputy minister was there, he said that he had nothing to do with that project and that it was Mr. Guité who went directly to the minister. The minister and Mr. Guité decided on the projects, on what was apparently a very political basis.
So the first thing that happened was that the public service itself was completely shut out. There were no criteria. There was no Treasury Board oversight. There was, in fact, not a specific appropriation by Parliament. I'm still not exactly sure where that money actually came from.
We are not going down the road of a lesson that we have all learned. All we are doing here is saying that there has to be a balance between appropriate due diligence and transparency and the rapid delivery of stimulus measures. But you don't dispose of all the safeguards that were in fact put in place by Treasury Board or by the government or by Parliament itself in order to get that money out the door.
So we have now, in this particular fund, the broad parameters, as I've said, in the economic action plan, which will define which programs will benefit from this money. Treasury Board will still review the expenditures. And as I've said, there is some streamlining of that process in cases where we would simply be duplicating what we are doing in terms of approvals. It's not necessary to go through the same forms if that's already been done.
Departments, I would also say, now have independent internal audit committees that include members external to government. They will also have input into these programs. Our government has taken steps to ensure that only qualified chief financial officers are appointed in departments and agencies. And of course we brought in the Federal Accountability Act, which makes a huge difference in terms of the responsibility that department heads, such as Mr. Wouters and other deputy ministers, have in respect of Parliament and the obligations they owe. So you could not go around the deputy minister, as happened in that unfortunate period in our country's history that we've come to know as the sponsorship scandal.