Mr. Speaker, the leader of the opposition may wish that we were bound to take the same position as officials in the department defending their actions. That is not the case here. In fact, that is why the Office of the Auditor General exists, to provide the government and the Canadian public with the opportunity to have this level of oversight and to be able to rely on that opinion, those findings, that advice and that work of the Auditor General. That is exactly what we are doing in this case and that is what the actions we are taking reflect as well.
In terms of any question of what has been said to Parliament, a very important point to understand, and it is the same point the Auditor General has expressed in his report, is that as a government, as ministers, as a cabinet, we have a right and an expectation that the advice we receive is something on which we can rely. This is something that, in this case, the Auditor General made some findings on. We happen to agree with those findings in the end.
In this case there is no privilege or question of any efforts to have misled Parliament. The Auditor General has spoken to it quite clearly and quite completely, laying out the circumstances in which that occurred, and we happen to agree with the Auditor General.