Public Accounts committee  Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. We thank you for this opportunity to meet with the committee to discuss chapter 4 of our 2010 report, “Managing Conflict of Interest”. As you mentioned, I'm accompanied today by Ronnie Campbell, assistant auditor general, and Tom Wileman, principal, who are responsible for this audit.

Public Accounts committee  I guess if you know the extent of modifications and you are able to accurately assess the costs related to that, yes, but I think these are very complex acquisitions. As we saw in one case, it took three years to actually specify the requirements, so it is very unlikely I think at the initial stage that there could have been a good estimation of what those costs would be.

Public Accounts committee  Actually, Chair, if I could just mention, unfortunately, I haven't informed the committee previously about some of the international boards and committees I'm on. So I will not be before the committee during the month of November, but my very capable colleagues will present the reports for committee.

Public Accounts committee  Chair, I prefer to stay with the word “troubling”. I think, obviously, the committee will want to ask department officials why this occurred, who will provide their explanation of this. I would go back, as I mentioned earlier, to the whole way these acquisitions are done. The strategy the government uses is the lowest-price compliant one.

Public Accounts committee  The minister did not do so at the time we completed this audit, no.

Public Accounts committee  It was completed in April.

Public Accounts committee  Mr. Chair, the purpose of our audit was really to establish which mechanisms had been set up by the departments in order to make public employees aware of the situation, and not to investigate situations. I cannot really answer those statements; perhaps this is a question that should be put to the government.

Public Accounts committee  Could you give me the reference?

Public Accounts committee  It is really up to the department to respond, it is the department that should give you this answer.

Public Accounts committee  No.

Public Accounts committee  We did look at how the agency was managing the outbreaks. In the most recent ones, we found they were complying with their policies and procedures. They seemed to be managing it well, contrary to what happened previously where they received a lot of criticism. They did their ”lessons learned” exercise from that.

Public Accounts committee  Some of the members on the committee may recall that a few years ago there were a number of issues being raised about management practices in smaller agencies; they weren't maybe getting the level of attention or oversight that was required and there were some not very good things happening.

Public Accounts committee  As my colleague said, we noted in the report that there appears to be a few projects that are running late. We will be reviewing this matter specifically during the second audit. As Mr. Campbell indicated, these were projects presented by governments, either the provinces or the territories, to the federal government with assurances that they would be completed on time.

Public Accounts committee  The difficulty is that the information collected is not necessarily reliable to be able to be aggregated to know the numbers of jobs that were created or maintained, and that's why government has had to go to these macroeconomic analyses. I think in their performance report, if they want to present cases of various projects and the number of jobs, it perhaps illustrates for Canadians what was done.

Public Accounts committee  It cannot be used to--