Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to the minister for appearing before committee today, and to the other witnesses.
Minister, you don't get to the most expensive weekend of meetings in history without a lot of bad management. I want to go through an anatomy of how things got so bad with you.
First, when the initial decision was made to try to shoehorn this into the riding of Tony Clement, a cabinet minister in your government, and you tried to shoehorn it in there and it wouldn't fit, the decision was then made to split it into two venues, even after Minister Clement talked about how much money would be saved by having it in one venue. It was dumped into Toronto at the last minute.
Then, instead of listening to most of the advice at the time to put it on the CNE grounds or in an area that was easy to secure and much less costly, it was put in downtown Toronto, in the financial district.
Minister, when you made the decision to shove the rest of this into downtown Toronto, on whose advice did you do it? Who did you talk to? Did you incorporate any of that advice into what you did, and if you did, can you be specific in terms of who you spoke to and what advice they were giving?