Chair, as I stated on December 9 at the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, it was quite normal for recommendations to go to a minister and for a negative decision to be returned to the department. That was understood to be consistent with the practice of government.
The second point would be that I have now been made aware that there were some other examples of when the minister's decision not to agree with the department's recommendation was conveyed in the same manner.
Third, I initiated a review of all the formats for our memos shortly after I started as president. At the time this memo was written and this decision was taken, we were in the process of improving the memo format in order to have greater clarity around the information in the memo and the decision box.