So a client speaks to one of our lawyers, probably a lawyer who is co-located with the client in one of the departmental legal services units. Let's imagine it's at the Department of Fisheries. Because it's a lawyer the client has a lot of dealings with, the first thing the lawyer will do will be to try to identify with the client what legal questions this raises. Chances are high in the Government of Canada that the issues will touch more than just the Department of Fisheries. It may well touch the Departrment of Indian Affairs, for example, if it's about a shared fishery involving aboriginal fishers, and so on. There may be constitutional issues.
So the lawyer, at the first instance, will try to figure out what all the legal issues are that have been raised and ensure that all the parts of the Department of Justice that ought to be brought to bear have a chance to feed into the analysis of this question. And by the same token, the lawyer will make sure other affected and touched client departments are also made aware that this issue is arising and they are given a chance to come in.
One of the issues that the Auditor General mentions in her report is that what we have not done in the past is, at an early stage in this process, sit down with the client to say, “Okay, we can now ballpark that it's going to take so many hours to get this piece of work done, and we estimate it's going to cost so much money for us to continue to do this work”, and have a conversation about whether the department, the client, wants the work to continue or whether, knowing that's the cost, it might make a decision not to go ahead with it at this time.
Much of the work we do, of course, is not discretionary. Much of the work the government faces involves legal issues that arrive on its doorstep. It didn't go looking for them. So it may have no choice but to proceed, but we haven't in many cases in the past had that kind of conversation, unless the file is really big. If the issue is enormous, we have had those conversations, but for smaller kinds of files, we have not done that.
We've developed tools, which are referred to in the audit report, in particular the legal risk management as an approach for analyzing the degree of risk in the issue that's been brought to the attention of the lawyer. So we would assess whether a bad outcome is likely to occur and, if that bad outcome does occur, precisely how bad it would be for the Government of Canada. So there's a problem, but it's almost certainly not going to happen, and if it does it's minor anyway. If you make that assessment early on, you're not going to spend much time on the file. If it is going to happen for sure and there's going to be a big, bad, adverse outcome for the government, then you'll spend a lot of attention on the file. You'll make sure that more resources are devoted to the management of that issue. That kind of analysis is made at the same time.