Thank you.
Good morning, Ms. Fraser. I am pleased to be seeing you once again this week.
I will be focusing on chapter 4. My colleague here is our defence critic. He will be looking at chapter 6 with you, and he will do so capably and in detail.
Chapter 4 deals with conflict of interest, and you seem to be less than satisfied with the measures taken since the beginning by Treasury Board in this area. I undertook a little exercise: I went back over the reports published over the past 10 years where you identified conflict of interest situations. I have the impression we have seen this all before and are getting bogged down. Nothing seems to be moving forward on this issue. I am really wondering why. I would be tempted to give you a long list of the conflict of interest situations that have been identified over the past 10 years. As you know, I am interested in the relocation file. I have looked into a number of cases where a conflict of interest was reported, as well as the investigation reports.
The Michel Genest report, for example, showed that all members of the selection committee for the procurement bids were in a conflict of interest situation. I also learned about the work done by the Department of Justice on this issue. They defined what constitutes a conflict of interest and a serious conflict of interest situation. A Justice Canada report talks about “[...]bribery, influence peddling, accepting benefits from persons dealing with government, accepting secret commissions, fraud, self-dealing, selling or influencing appointments and breach of trust.”
Regarding Treasury Board's MAF, some, but very little, of the work has been provided. There is still nothing about the legal provisions expected since 2007. I would like to know whether, in the exchanges you have had with people at Treasury Board, you have had the impression that they are willing to address this issue once and for all. This is ridiculous. When we were working recently on the modernization issue, I raised the topic of the Interchange Canada program, which was criticized in 2006 and 2007, when human resources practices were audited. I am extremely concerned about the direction things are taking with that program. I do not know if you can comment on that.