Thank you, Lesley.
It's interesting, because I was trying to think of that word. I thought you were going to ask them what came to mind about how they felt about being on the committee. My word was “disappointed” because I have to tell you that it's the best committee out there and I'm disappointed that I can't be joining you as a committee member.
I have a lot of experience on the other side. I was the auditor general in Manitoba for two different terms. It's one of those things that people do ask me often, if I didn't sort of figure it out the first time. Also, I then moved on to British Columbia. I've watched the Manitoba and B.C. public accounts committees in action, and I've had the pleasure of serving both of those committees as the auditor general. I've been involved with Dr. Burns and many others with the foundation I now work with and with the history of performance audits and how accountability with the committees has evolved over the years.
The foundation has been around for 40 years now, which matches the amount of time I've been in the auditing industry. I remember back to those early days when it used to be called the Canadian Comprehensive Auditing Foundation, CCAF. The “comprehensive” was brought out and it was the then auditor general James Macdonell and his colleagues in the private sector accounting firms who really came together and said that it's not enough for the public sector to know what numbers happen during the year, that is, the financial statement results; they have to know what they mean and they have to have more information to help them understand whether or not programs were delivered appropriately.
That was the start of it all, and it's evolved to a very mature place today. The foundation is in the unique position of having a lot of knowledge from the audit side. We have great support from all of the legislative auditors across Canada, and we do international work as well. Much of it is funded by Global Affairs. Currently we're doing work in Rwanda, Senegal, Guyana and Vietnam.
We also have that unique position of spending a lot of time with oversight bodies. Our work with the public accounts committee has been since the beginning. Bringing together both audit and oversight has been something the foundation is very proud of. It's always an interesting time seeing how things evolve.
There's an annual conference. For those of you who don't know about it, now you will. It's a joint conference of—and you're going to hear a ton of acronyms from the accounting profession. When your auditor throws them at you, just ask her what they mean. The CCOLA is the Canadian Conference of Legislative Auditors. They meet regularly as a group across Canada. CCPAC, of course, is the Canadian Council of Public Accounts Committees. The CCOLA and CCPAC meet once a year rotating around the country. This year was the remote one that was held in Victoria. I missed that one as I had just left my position there. It's a great time to meet your colleagues in the field and to bond with your auditors.
We have a set of slides that have been distributed to you. We'll follow them loosely. In terms of where we are, I just went through slide 2 on what the foundation is all about. We do a lot of research and training both in Canada and internationally.
As Lesley pointed out, I'm very pleased to have been invited to your committee.
Today, we're going to go through some general information about much of the research that has been collected. It is a gift from our esteemed colleague Dr. Burns. She's done a lot of work in this area. We have a lot of documents and background that we'll go through. We'll also talk a bit about performance audits.
Again, it's a bit of what it is and what it's not, and some examples of that. We hope we'll have quite a bit of time at the end to answer your questions about what would be of interest to you.
I'll hand it back now to Lesley.
By the way, Lesley, if I'm doing this wrong, just tell me and I'll go back to the slides.