Thank you.
I share your disappointment. I share your disappointment because from my previous position I saw the people of CBSA working very hard to try to make the border work during the pandemic and allow commercial goods to come in, and managing the border in a way that avoided it being clogged up and having an impact on the economy.
That being said, as I said, I share your disappointment that there is such a lack of documentation. If that documentation extended six months after the beginning of the pandemic, I would feel much more comfortable being here to defend that and explain that. However, what didn't happen was a recognition that this was going to go on for more than six months, so we needed to stop, regroup, set a budget, and understand how we were going to keep going at this pace—and the pace was significant. The public health measures were changing on a fairly regular basis and that had to be coded in, that had to be released. Officers had to be trained. A lot of things had to happen. As we said, the lack of documentation is difficult to understand as it extends over that amount of time.
I have a management response plan that I have developed with the team in response to both the Auditor General's audit and the procurement ombud's. I have an audit under way. We have made some significant changes. The fact that we are approving contracts at a committee is probably a “belt and suspenders”. It shouldn't be that a committee is required to oversee decisions that are in people's proper authority. We're going to keep that in place until we have some comfort that the controls are in place, that people understand their roles and responsibilities.
As the Auditor General pointed out yesterday, a lot of the recommendations are variations of following the rules. I will agree with her that the department can do better than that.