Thank you, Mr. Chair.
It's great to hear that we acknowledge the work of the internal audit team at GAC. I echo that statement, but I think the rest of it was political.
The good thing is that the internal team did a great job and it was proactively and publicly released. This was an internal audit focused on low-dollar-value items. The ministers—plural—did not have any involvement in approving the low-dollar-value items. However, having an opportunity to ask questions and gain an understanding of what those low-dollar-value items were was a great idea, as was having an opportunity to talk to those who authorized them.
By the way, there are three ministers as part of GAC, and we are not sure why—aside from the political reason—Minister Joly has been highlighted here. There is the Minister of International Development, the Minister of International Trade as well as the Minister of Foreign Affairs. All three ministers are part of GAC, so selecting one minister as opposed to the others for an area for which they have no signing authority or were not engaged in signing authority is questionable.
We would gladly invite the officials to come and give us an understanding and a breakdown of these. They are publicly released so it would be a good opportunity for us to look at what types of contracts there were, what the purpose was and how many of the low-dollar-value contracts were under one theme.
After that, if we see any trend that points to a specific ministry, then we would be open to having senior officials come. If that brings to light any type of ministerial involvement, then we'd be glad to support a motion to bring the ministers.
Therefore, given the way it's drafted, we will not be supporting this motion—at least I won't be supporting it. I believe the approach that we should take is to first of all commend the internal audit group, as I believe everybody is doing, and get an understanding of the scope of the audit. Since it's publicly shared, there's a great opportunity for us to all look at it and then have the procurement department within GAC come in and explain.
Then, if we needed to, we would be able to move into having officials at the next level and then—although I doubt it—we'd be in a position to look at any ministerial involvement, unless we vote on this and we vote it down—or at least I would vote it down—or we could look into amendments.