Thank you, Chair.
Thank you very much for your attendance today, sir.
I want to end up at the same place as the previous questioner, but I want to get this straight in my own mind. Let's go back through this. There was originally a need to move, primarily because there wasn't enough space to meet the current need, let alone the anticipated expansion of the department. That was the original desire for this to be done.
Then, this is where it gets complicated: talking about process. I keep coming back to these e-mails around June and July 2001. They refer to the staff doing the tender being advised by the minister's office that they should hold this project; that's in June, and it's repeated again in July, asking about this being held.
The best I can figure is that we have a situation where the agency said they had this need and put out the tender call. The office of the minister advised the staff in June that they had an interest and they ought to hold on this, that it's not necessarily going through. What I can't find is the paperwork that says to go ahead again. But then it restarts again, and the whole thing goes through, the minister's office having already once put it on hold.
Then it goes ahead, and then we find out that two weeks after the deal is signed—two weeks after—somebody.... This is what Pierre's trying to get to: who made that decision? At some point, two weeks after this deal is signed, there's a decision taken that this isn't the way we're going to go, and now we're out $4.5 million.
I'm not understanding at all who got involved when, and who put a hold on, and what that means. At the end of day, who was the individual—it's a fair question—who said that even though we as a government have entered into this agreement, we're not going to go that way? Who made that decision two weeks later, and why did they reverse themselves, having already interjected themselves into the process beforehand to say hold off?