The thing that puzzled me about it is the absolute silliness of presenting a document--which I still believe was falsified--to a parliamentary committee that purported to represent the consent of the three signers and actually did not.
I shouldn't say “consent”, but the “opinions”, because it is the duty of public servants to implement the orders of their ministers. And that I do not think is in dispute here. I think that CIDA can perfectly and happily live with the decision that was made there, even though it was against the advice of their officials.
I do consider the presentation of that document in that form to be a very serious offence against what Parliament is entitled to get as documents. Misrepresentation of that sort is very serious. And it doesn't, in my mind, matter who put it there; it's the minister's responsibility that it was there. And it doesn't matter whether CIDA had another kind of document or not. The letter could have been rewritten very easily. That takes a few minutes or seconds.
What matters is that the letter that came before the committee had in it the appearance that three people had agreed and recommended a decision, whereas only one of them had done it. Now, that's a problem. And sure, at one level it's a secretarial and administrative problem, but at another level it's Parliament getting something that was not an accurate representation of what had happened.