Thanks, Chair. I'll try to do this quickly.
I just want to touch on a couple of themes that are running through these reports and some ones that we've seen in the recent past. I'll start with the special examination on Marine Atlantic. Again, in your overall message in paragraph 14, Auditor General, you state that:
Overall, we found that Marine Atlantic Inc. had good practices in place to oversee the running of the Corporation and to manage its operations.
It's hard for us to ask for much more than that.
The next paragraph says:
Nonetheless, we were concerned that the Corporation was not able to make long-term strategic decisions because of circumstances outside its control—specifically, delays by the government in approving the Corporation’s full five-year corporate plans. We reported this issue in our 2009 special examination, and we found it to be a significant deficiency in the current audit.
That's the government, and it's not necessarily this one per se. It's previous governments too. I've fessed up that I saw the same problems bottlenecked at the provincial level where decisions at the centre—around the premier or the prime minister—are holding up major decisions, and so they're not able to do the job that they want to do for Canadians because the senior government that gave them the mandate and the funding to do it didn't give them the approvals they need and didn't give them the people on the board. I'm running out of time.
Canada Post—it takes so many hits. It needs to be said. This is the Auditor General:
Overall, during the period covered by this audit, we found that the Canada Post Corporation had in place good practices to oversee the running of the Corporation and to manage its operations.
It's been a while since it's had that kind of good news, but there you are, and fairness dictates that it be put there. However, the AG goes on:
We were concerned that circumstances outside the Corporation’s control limited its ability to make long-term strategic decisions. The circumstances included delays in several areas that were within the government’s control: appointing new members to the Corporation’s Board of Directors, along with a new President and Chief Executive Officer; approving the Corporation’s annual corporate plans...
Does that sound familiar? That's just from here. There's one more here—