Yesterday during our meeting there was some discussion around the agreement in principle. I had what I thought was a pretty straightforward question: when is an agreement in principle considered to be a contract? The answer was that the Auditor General's office considered the agreement in principle to in fact be a contract because senior officials were involved.
I'm curious, because that's quite an assumption. Is there some sort of policy framework that says that if a deputy minister or a department head is involved, at that point an agreement in principle is considered by the Auditor General's office to be a contract? And how do legal interpretations differ on this?