Public Accounts committee  I'm going to look to Philippe to see if I have this correct, but ISED was responsible for gathering all the data from the regional development agencies and then making a global picture. That is why we included them in the recommendation about gathering data and looking for consistency.

Public Accounts committee  I always believe that every entity included in one of our audits should be called to the committee in order to help determine the best way to improve a program and to improve program delivery for Canadians.

Public Accounts committee  I would leave it up to the chair and the membership to decide who best to invite as witnesses.

Public Accounts committee  I believe that's the kind of information that the regional development agencies should be providing to you. Because repayment of the repayable portion of the loans is only to begin as of December 2023, there are no expected repayments at this time.

Public Accounts committee  I can probably give it to you now, but we can absolutely follow up with it in writing if you prefer.

Public Accounts committee  This is a bit of a difficult question. I do have a dollar amount that would include paragraphs 14.49 and 14.50. We did sampling, so the dollar amounts that I have relate to the three regional development agencies that we looked at that were included in our audit. We extrapolated the elements that we thought should not have been paid—the ineligible expenses—and we found 25 cases, for a total dollar value of $2.9 million.

Public Accounts committee  In our perspective, these are ineligible expenses because we believe that with the national eligibility criteria and the national outline of what was eligible, they should not have been paid out. However, the regional development agencies did not apply that consistently, as I said previously.

Public Accounts committee  No. We did not reach out to community futures themselves. There are hundreds of them, so I can't comment on whether any of them remained open.

Public Accounts committee  During our audit, we looked at how the funding was allocated through the regional development agencies. We actually have a chart, exhibit 14.2, that gives you that layout. We noted that they looked at demographic information, but often economic factors were factored into how the allocation was done.

Public Accounts committee  I'm not sure that I can explain why Mr. Jones made different statements. What I can do is explain to you what we found in our audit. In our audit here, we were able to highlight for you, with this graph, the type of information that was gathered, typically through self-identification application forms.

Public Accounts committee  As I mentioned, we gathered the data that came off of the self-identification in the application forms. We did not see any information about youth, which is why it's not included in the chart.

Public Accounts committee  I agree with you. The regional development agencies were created precisely because we recognized that the regions had different realities and priorities. Here, however, we're not talking about a program that existed before the pandemic and had to be adapted to take that situation into account.

Public Accounts committee  You're absolutely right that having accurate information is always needed to make well-informed decisions, and in this case it's needed in order to demonstrate that the outcomes of the program were properly achieved. What we noted in the audit was that the information being gathered when it came to demonstrating what jobs would be maintained as a result of receiving the funding was often overstated.

Public Accounts committee  Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you for this opportunity to discuss our report on the regional relief and recovery fund, which was tabled in the House of Commons on December 9, 2021. I would like to start by acknowledging that this meeting is taking place on the traditional unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinabe people.

Public Accounts committee  That's a really difficult question. To make that analogy, every country is quite unique. We could look to a country that's an island on its own, like Australia, which did really well with enforcement at the beginning, but it's easy to control access. Canada has a very large land border.