Canadian Heritage committee  My colleague is saying he thought perhaps it was because they were considered as cabinet confidences. That might be why. I must admit I don't have the answer.

Canadian Heritage committee  We would have access to the business plans.

Canadian Heritage committee  For cabinet confidences we have access to analysis; we don't have access to the actual recommendation. There are certain things that are excluded, but we have access to most.

Canadian Heritage committee  Yes, there were issues. For example, Fort Henry was one of the ones at the time. I know that since then there have been funds put in to do work there. There were other places we mentioned, but these are mainly the historic sites. So it's the wear and tear and the age of these that are creating many of the problems.

Canadian Heritage committee  You would have to ask the department.

Canadian Heritage committee  The issue we raised is that many of the activities that Telefilm Canada carries out are under contract or through agreements with the department. This is a very unusual situation for a crown corporation. Usually, the crown corporation and its board of directors will receive guidance from the minister on the objectives.

Canadian Heritage committee  You might want to ask the department, but my understanding is that given the recent changes, it is actually the Canadian Television Fund that will now make the decisions, and it is Telefilm Canada that kind of carries out the operations. But Telefilm Canada does not make the strategic or policy decisions.

Canadian Heritage committee  This is largely related to tax credits for productions. You must have Canadian content and Canadian content is awarded on the basis of points, so if the people who work in the production are Canadians, you get certain points depending upon their.... So one of the issues was whether they were actually verifying if these people were truly Canadian.

Canadian Heritage committee  The department's officials would perhaps be better able to answer that question than I am. We definitely believe that program evaluation is an important part of their management. We haven't audited all the evaluation services in government, although we were considering doing one in a few years.

Canadian Heritage committee  To my knowledge, there hasn't been. We did not include that in our report. I should point out that the assessment as to the condition was made by the department, and you're right: two-thirds were judged poor to fair. Obviously, depending on the condition, different actions would need to be undertaken.

Canadian Heritage committee  No, we haven't looked at that.

Canadian Heritage committee  Yes. We're conducting a follow-up on built heritage. We'll report in about a year, in February 2007. We're also the auditors of the museums. That's another aspect of the portfolio. We conduct special examinations, that is to say an audit of the overall management of each of the museums.

Canadian Heritage committee  There's the follow-up on built heritage.

Canadian Heritage committee  While we haven't audited, I would be pretty sure that all of the documents have not been. There was a backlog, quite a significant backlog at the time.

Canadian Heritage committee  May I give you one example we noted in the report? We said that the backlogs included a number of ministers' records from the last 35 years. So there are records of ministers from 35 years ago that have not been completely catalogued and put into the archives, and I would be very surprised if the backlog has been dealt with in the last three years.