Thank you, Mr. Chair, and through you, thank you to our witnesses for joining us here this morning.
Commissioner, I want to begin with the “Verschuren Report”, which you obviously undertook and in which you provided a thorough analysis of some of the challenges that were discovered with Ms. Verschuren and her work at SDTC.
I wanted to highlight a few sentences that were found at paragraph 151 of your report. You wrote:
In reality, the entire approval process for Seed funding was flawed. The evidence shows that decisions regarding Seed funding had essentially already been made at earlier stages and the Board's final approval was automatic since decisions were made by consensus and Seed funding, in any event, was included in the consent agenda. Thus, an abstention, especially a partial one in respect of particular projects contained within a single agenda item, had no impact on the outcome for those projects.
Effectively, to paraphrase, these decisions were already made by the time Ms. Verschuren recused herself or abstained, and that simple act at the end actually didn't do anything to negate the conflict of interest, because in the entire process leading up to that, she would have been conflicted.
Am I correct in that interpretation?