Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
I will be mercifully brief on this. I was not given any instructions as to specifically what the committee would like to hear from me. I have gone through and have read the blues of the investigation to date, and I'll just make some comments on things as they specifically relate to me. Then I'll turn it over to my colleague, who can pick it up from there.
In this committee, when Mr. Williams was the chair shortly after the change of government, the government indicated its intention to bring forward legislation strengthening public service disclosure and to create a new piece of legislation for that. I had worked on that as the chairman of the government operations committee, and we had made a series of recommendations. The Prime Minister at the time, Prime Minister Martin, asked me, as President of the Treasury Board, if I would establish a process and let it be known to the public service that if they had concerns about improprieties within the public service, until such time as there was strengthened legislation in place they could bring it to my office. That was done, I believe, in a presentation before this committee at that time.
I won't go through the chronology of events, because you know better than I the details of the history of this. I want to speak specifically about the actions that were taken by me and by Treasury Board.
We received a package....
I want to clarify just one small discrepancy. Staff Sergeant Lewis said in his testimony here that he'd brought it to our office on February 16. He brought it on February 19. We've had a talk about that, just to acknowledge that it's the case, because all of our records show February 19.
I passed it, according to the protocol we had set up, immediately to the secretary of the Treasury Board. He assigned it to staff; they had a look at it; he then referred it to the Auditor General and to the Deputy Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness. In the letter he sent to the deputy minister, he said:
I enclose one of three copies of a document which was provided to the President of the Treasury Board on February 19, 2004. The author explicitly asked that the copies be provided to your minister and to the Auditor General. I would be grateful if you would ensure that this copy is delivered personally to your minister.
As you will see from this document it contains a number of allegations, which the President of the Treasury Board takes very seriously, and which he has undertaken to pursue.
That's signed by the then secretary to the Treasury Board, Mr. Jim Judd.
Subsequently, those documents were delivered, and discussions were held with the commissioner, with the Auditor General, and with the deputy minister. From that, the events involving those individuals and the criminal investigation flowed.
I'm here to answer any questions the committee may have.