Mr. Speaker, in fact it was extraordinary; that is for sure. On July 15, just a short while later, the Business Development Bank branch at Trois-Rivières wrote a letter to senior bank executives saying that the auberge was a “high global risk outside the normal policy and criteria of the bank”.
The loan had been approved and announced two months earlier, strangely enough during the 1997 election. How did grants and loans in the Prime Minister's riding get political approval prior to departmental approval?