Thank you, Chair.
The committee has been seized with the contracting abuse that has happened during the tenure of this NDP-Liberal government, and now this corruption and abuse issue is coming to Global Affairs, the domain of yet another prospective Liberal leadership candidate. In the last five years, Foreign Affairs has hired outside consultants over 8,000 times, spending over half a billion dollars. Your audit suggests that the rules are not being followed in about a quarter of those cases, so if that proportion holds, we're talking about a total of, roughly, 2,000 contracts at Global Affairs, Mélanie Joly's department, that didn't follow the rules.
I note that we're supposed to be promoting democracy and fighting corruption around the world, yet we're looking at a situation where one-quarter of the contracts at Global Affairs are not following the rules. I think that's really disgraceful and shouldn't be passed off as simply part of the complexity of the operating environment.
I'll start by asking the assistant deputy minister what kind of message this sends to our allies and partners and to emerging democracies that we're working with on issues of adherence to rules and to the rule of law. How does this impact our credibility, and what kind of message does it send that we have these massive problems internally?