Thank you for your question.
The external advisers were identified in the course of these strategic reviews. Thus they were a part of the activity and the modalities of the four-year cycle of activity that has just come to a close. They advised the ministers and deputy ministers. The first objective was to find people who were first of all familiar with the operations of an organization and could provide a sort of external confirmation of the fact that the process was properly implemented.They were not necessarily experts in certain types of activities, but rather people who had the competency to confirm that the review had been well and duly done. They had to be independent—in English we say “at arm's length”. They had to be people who had no links with the organization in question, and were not already sitting on boards or committees directly related to those organizations. And so they were people who really had expertise or specialized knowledge, or had the trust of the ministers and deputy ministers.