Mr. Chairman, thank you. It's a pleasure to be here on this committee.
Folks—Mr. Estabrooks and Mr. Hogan—you're two of the finest Nova Scotians you'll ever meet. With that, I have a few questions to ask of you.
As all of us know, ACOA when it started out didn't have the greatest track record for responsibility for taxpayers' money when it came to recovering some of the money put into Cape Breton enterprises. But I will give you guys credit. Over the last seven years, the cleanup of that department has been tremendous, and you deserve a lot of credit for cleaning an awful lot of it up.
Having said that, there are still some problems that we hear—and they are front-page news every time—when a company receives ACOA funding of some kind and then, once the funding is gone, they leave or the company no longer operates.
What parameters are in place so that when companies get loans of some kind, the recovery of that money back to the taxpayer can happen, so that the company doesn't just claim bankruptcy and off they go to another part of the planet?