Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Mr. Wernick, thank you for being here and for accepting our invitation on such short notice. I really appreciate that.
I would like to take this opportunity, as you mentioned this is National Public Service Week, to congratulate the Public Service of Canada for the excellent job they do in serving Canadians. We should never forget the important service they provide and how fortunate we are to have a public service that is so professional and so dedicated.
That said, you have just opened the theme of this meeting. You say you disagree with the sweeping generalizations that the Auditor General made in his chapter zero, or his message. We as a committee—and this was pretty much unanimous in the committee—were quite distressed to find that in his analysis, what happened, both with the Phoenix pay system and with services to first nations, Métis, and Inuit communities, had, for him, become almost the image of what went wrong, even though we had such a great series of checks and balances in our system. It's all there, so how could this happen?
I'd like to hear you tell us, as you say you have your own views on the matter, how you would consider it avoidable. What wasn't done that could have been done to avoid such a failure?