Thank you for your question.
I think there are several elements in there. I'll try not to go on too long.
I don't understand the comparison to indigenous policy, and it's an area I worked in. The situation of Canada's indigenous peoples is the result of generations of public policy and law, and other factors. There are many theories and explanations about how we got here, and very different views about how we can move forward. It's a policy failure, basically. It's going to be a difficult one to move forward on.
As some of you will remember, the Auditor General's predecessor, Ms. Fraser, tabled observations, a chapter zero on first nations, in the spring of 2009. It's a very helpful piece on indigenous policy. I commend it to you. It had four very specific prescriptions about what could be done to improve outcomes in government programming for first nations. I thought it was a solid contribution by the Auditor General to public debate, and it's something that I have used a great deal in advising ministers at the indigenous affairs department. I'm happy to pursue that, but it's a very big topic.
I think that you can continue to pursue the explanations of what happened in the pay system. My view is that it's comprehensible, and it's all there in the two reports from the Auditor General, in the Goss Gilroy report and in the Gartner report.
I don't want to put words in anybody's mouth, but I think what he's trying to say is that there's no single culprit or single explanation. To the people who are looking to simply say, “Here are two or three people we can blame” or “Here's the explanation”, my take on the pay system is that it was a perfect storm and confluence of all kinds of factors, which are laid out in the Auditor General's two chapters.
You can continue to pursue that line of inquiry. There have been many officials appearing at this committee, at the government operations committee, and at the Senate finance committee. It's perfectly legitimate to want to pursue the forensics of what happened and how we got here. In my view, it's not actually going to help that much in the urgent job of stabilizing the system and getting people paid on time and accurately today. It doesn't provide a lot of guidance on what to do going forward, other than the specific recommendations the Auditor General made on this topic and the report by Goss Gilroy, which I think provides lots of lessons on project management.