Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you for being here this afternoon.
As you know, when we receive these reports by the Auditor General, we always look at the ones that we want to look at first and the ones we would personally like to emphasize.
For me, seeing the mental health strategy that had been suggested back in 2014 and where we are now at, les lacunes, in terms of the still pervasive issues at the time of the audit is very disturbing. I'm glad to see that there was progress. However, we've seen this record before at this committee.
One of the issues that keeps coming up is that a lot of departments have plans. They have a strategic plan that they put into place, and they have this great vision. The strategic plan is there, but there's no back-up plan to implement it, so there's no critical path. I'm always shocked to see that happen so consistently, and this follows that same road.
Before I ask Mr. Paulson a few questions, I would like the Auditor General to comment on his statement “About the Audit” in his report. In the statement you say, “RCMP management refused to confirm that the findings in this report are factually based, because of disagreement about the approach used to report statistics from the file review and member survey.”
Can you comment on that? That's a disturbing statement to make that there was disagreement on the data that you collected with respect to the RCMP.