Thank you for the invitation to appear before your committee today.
I feel it necessary to give you a little of my background so that you will know that I did not resign for what may be characterized as petty personal reasons. All of the board members of AHRC brought with them particular skills and expertise. I brought to the board an in-depth knowledge and understanding of policy, governmental processes, legislation, as well as how governmental agencies, such as AHRC, are set up and how they function. I have this knowledge and perspective from work that I have done provincially for the Ontario government, nationally for Health Canada, the Public Health Agency of Canada, as a chair and member of several federal, provincial, territorial committee and task forces, as well as work that I am doing internationally for the OECD.
I share the concerns detailed by Françoise and want to add to this list of concerns. I want to make some brief comments regarding inadequate disclosure about budget and potentially not getting value for taxpayers' money that was spent, blocking substantive input by board members into regulations, and persistent resistance to input from board members on matters of substance and process.
I may not get to the second two topics, so I would welcome questions for those.
In terms of the budget, requests for information about the budget consistently met with resistance from the president. When information was finally presented, it was in a format that was not customary or sufficiently detailed. The board never reviewed a full budget for 2008 and 2009. When the budget for 2009-10 was initially presented, it was as a slide deck, with just some total numbers included. Repeated requests finally led to a presentation of some more detailed information, but even then there were parts of the budget that were less than transparent.
For example, there was continued resistance to providing information about the cost of governance. The cost was buried in a number of categories so that it was impossible to know what the board costs were as a percentage of the total budget for the agency. Some board members had concerns about whether some expenditures were inappropriate or the result of inappropriate processes.
Here are some examples. Françoise has mentioned the contract on the feasibility of altruistic gamete donation, so I won't go into that too much. It was seen as undermining the legislation that the board was supposed to be upholding, which was section 7. There was inaccurate information in the statement of work, and the rationale for AHRC to do the project was not clear. When concerns were raised about this, there was an attempt to suggest that the contract was with the university and not the individual physician. The statement of work was later revised, and other questions were never answered.
The agency also contracted for individuals to provide HR consulting and other services at the same time that the agency had contracts with Health Canada to provide the same services. This was at a time when the agency had only a handful of people on staff.
The original 2009-10 budget had an amount allocated for consultants of $368,000, which board members were told was for three consulting contracts. The figure was questioned by a board member. In the revised budget, at a teleconference, the allocation for consultants was changed to $1,722,300 plus other professional services, which was another $500,000 for another consultant to set up a health registry. So it's quite a discrepancy between $368,000 originally and over $2 million. Even then there were discrepancies in the budget.
The president's travel patterns to Vancouver appear to map onto personal interests more so than to professional obligations. According to information available under proactive disclosure on the AHRC website, the president spent a lot of time in the Vancouver office over holidays and long weekends. As of June 2010, nine of the twenty posted dates for work in the Vancouver office have included holidays.
Next, with regard to blocking substantive input by board members into regulations, contradictory statements were made about how board members could or could not have input into regulatory development.