Thank you, madam.
We, ourselves, do not do audits of effectiveness or effectiveness studies. Those would require evaluations. In fact, if you look at the Auditor General Act, it says that we should look to the departments to see what they have in place to measure their effectiveness. So in a way, this audit is pointing to a lack of information within the department to be able to measure the effectiveness—the types of activities that should be carried out and the targets and measurement of those.
What we were really focusing on here was the whole resource allocation process. How are resources within the department being allocated to the various regulatory programs and on what basis? What information is being used for that? The department has obviously indicated that it is starting to work on that, but I think in order to really judge the effectiveness, you need to have that base information, which isn't there.
We do audits of specific programs. We did an audit two years ago on the medical devices program, and we raised a number of issues there. In fact, the whole allocation of resources was noted as an issue when we did that first audit, when we saw the funding profile for the program. That's why we decided to conduct a specific audit looking at how resources were allocated.