Mr. Chair, I should make sure that the record is clear. I wouldn't want to speak for the Auditor General, but the Auditor General made an independent decision to conduct an audit. As much as we enjoy working with the Auditor General, it was not at our invitation. I just want to make sure that nobody thinks that it was somehow at our behest that this was done.
The reason for these two reviews are as follows: Under the legal structure that is SDTC and the kinds of legal responsibilities that it has and that the Crown has, it is very easy for us to ask for, and indeed to follow up with, audit work with regard to the contribution agreement. This is the kind of contract we have with SDTC, which is legally at arm's length. It's not a government organization; it's a private organization at arm's length. The Raymond Chabot report looked at all of those issues related to whether they were following the contribution agreement, applying conflict of interest and doing the sorts of things that would be required by virtue of the contribution agreement.
The Raymond Chabot report also made some observations about human resources. You will note that in our management response and action plan, the character of what we have to say about HR is different from the other elements. The reason is that human resources are legally the responsibility of the organization. It's legally the responsibility of the board. These are not Crown employees; these are private sector employees working for a foundation. We had to get agreement from the SDTC board to waive their rights to allow the Attorney General to hire an agent to go and do a review of HR.
Obviously, given all of the allegations and given the pressure, the board was very co-operative. They were certainly eager to allow the government to go in, but that was a separate process, because unlike with the contribution agreement, where we have full legal rights to march in there, look around and demand documents, on the HR front, for the Crown to take action without the consent of the board and without having all of its legal bases covered would have been ultra vires.
I'm not a lawyer, but there are no legal grounds for the government to do that. In fact, it could attract quite a bit of liability from employees, managers and others, so we needed the board's assent to do that. That was a separate process run by McCarthy Tétrault on behalf of the Attorney General.