I'll answer that, because I was the person who drafted the letter and signed it.
I want to say publicly that when I made the decision to resign, I did not communicate that to anyone. I did not communicate it to a single member on the board. I sent to the chair a professional, or what I thought was a professional.... You'll see from my letter it's one word: it simply says thank you very much, I'm resigning.
I made a decision, having done that, that I would not engage in conversation with any board member, and my secretary can confirm that. I engaged in no phone conversations, no e-mail conversations. I did not want it to ever be able to be said afterwards that I orchestrated anything.
After Barbara made a decision to resign, I resumed conversation with her but did not speak at all with Irene in the interim. Once Irene decided to resign, I resumed conversation with her.
At that time, we were all sharing different perspectives and concerns. We thought that a reasonable thing to do, given that this was a Governor in Council appointment, was to ask the government for an exit interview, where we would be able to come forward. Certainly in terms of how I thought about it, I thought the government ought to hold me accountable. I've made a decision, and they ought to want to know.
I wrote a letter. It was reviewed by my two colleagues to make sure that they were comfortable with the content. I signed it on behalf of the three of us. I sent it by e-mail and I sent it by regular mail to ensure it would be received.
About a month later I did receive an e-mail correspondence that was a follow-up. And given that I sent my letter in August, it's perhaps not surprising, with the summer, that there was a delay.
At that time I explained, via e-mail, that we would like to be able to come to Ottawa, the three of us together; that we thought we should have an opportunity to share with the government what had happened and what, in our view, had gone wrong. We specifically made reference to the fact that we expected to come before this committee and that we would like to come to the all-party committee and be able to report on progress. That's how we framed it. We really didn't want this to either get played out in a political way or get played out in the press.
The response we had, after a bit of back-and-forth e-mail, was that they did not have the resources to pay for the three of us to fly to Ottawa to meet with them, and so could we please do this by teleconference. At this point I conversed again with my colleagues to ask them if they would like to do this, and we decided that we didn't feel comfortable, given the nature of what we thought we wanted to share, the complexity of the issues, and the kinds of questions we anticipated. To be perfectly frank, we had lived an experience whereby issues that were really important were relegated to teleconferences rather than the face-to-face meetings, and time for face-to-face meetings was taken up with busywork.
I wrote back a second time and said, look, under the circumstances, given what we would like to be able to say, etc., we are reiterating our request to please meet with you in person, and if not, we accept that the consequence would be that we would have our first opportunity to speak with this committee.
So we specifically said that this was how we would interpret a decision not to bring us forward. And then, indeed, there was silence.