Thank you very much for the comments. I must say it's been an honour for me, Mr. Forster, and all of our team that we got to work on something very important for the Canadian economy. It has been an honour, and yes, it was hard work, but we're very happy that we had the opportunity to do this.
For some best practices, first of all, it was very important to involve our internal audit function early on in the process. They did readiness assessments of our programs. It's usually good to anticipate the problems you're going to have, assess your readiness, and fix your problems before you run into problems. It's pretty simple, but it's a very important best practice that we will employ for years to come.
The other issue is that we have a fully functioning external audit committee. They're external members and they ask us tough questions, but because they are from outside the government, they have a different view of things. They have been part of our control framework and they have been asking us pretty challenging questions, which always results in improvements.
Another issue is, as the Auditor General mentions, that we used an information management system, so all our applications can come online, but also, the particular database flags the problems we're going to have. If, for example, a project was supposed to start at a certain date and suddenly it's slipping by six months--out of 6,000 projects, you can't do this by hand--it pops up to say that you should look at this project because there may be a problem. It gives us a control mechanism.
As for other best practices, risk management was a real issue, because we had a lot of money going through and tight deadlines. You can make mistakes. We had accepted that we can make mistakes, but the fact we had a good sense of the risks and the mitigation strategies in the department was a huge, huge help to us. Another one was that before we submitted anything for approvals, we had internal control processes that went through and chaired by Mr. Forster. They approved every project in terms of the conditions and whether they met those. One by one, every one of them was reviewed by a panel.
The last thing is that without the partnership with the municipalities and the provinces, we could never have done this. Huge credit goes to them. We were the federal arm for the infrastructure programs, but they were the real winners.