Public Accounts committee  She's not here, sir.

Public Accounts committee  I'll appeal to the chair on this. This has been an issue with this committee. I'm the accountable deputy head, the ADM is sitting beside you, and the director general is sitting beside him.

Public Accounts committee  She's under my supervision.

Public Accounts committee  I understand that the minister was briefed directly by the Auditor General on it.

Public Accounts committee  Every negotiating mandate and settlement is approved by cabinet.

Public Accounts committee  It would not have been approved by cabinet if there had not been agreement by all the ministers in the room, and Parliament.

Public Accounts committee  I don't have the cabinet records from 23 years ago. It would not have been approved by cabinet, nor indeed by Parliament, which passed limitation legislation, if there were problems with those departments.

Public Accounts committee  I'd have to look at that. We're now down to under 30 pages to describe the entire activities of my department. So my guess is it's a very abbreviated reference. What I'm trying to get on the Internet and into other documents is a much clearer reporting of each of those 21 agreements, what has happened in that area, and what are the things that are underway.

Public Accounts committee  I would assume that's a fair characterization of what Mr. Campbell heard from staff when he was interviewing them. I think that the department has probably been trained--due to the fact that we are often sued about implementation issues--to be very, very cautious in accepting something as an obligation, because you might end up in court.

Public Accounts committee  Well, we can do that, and we'll do it on an ongoing basis, probably through the website, and there may be some references that you can get through the performance report. There are over 80 obligations. I think it would be helpful to members of Parliament to keep track of what's happened, because you wouldn't be characterizing it as an empty shell if you note that there were 91,000 square kilometres of land transferred, $300 million worth of money.

Public Accounts committee  We have to negotiate the format and the length of DPRs with Treasury Board, and we're down to under 30 pages, with hot links to websites, to characterize everything my department does. It's a bit of a challenge. We will keep the public informed and parliamentarians informed. One of the accountability tools is that there are annual reports attached to most of the land claims agreements; many of them have a statute that Parliament passed for implementation.

Public Accounts committee  It will be two years in May.

Public Accounts committee  Mr. Sewell alluded to a few of them. I would say a couple of things. One is that INAC doesn't do very much of the procurement. It's either done by Public Works or other federal departments. There's a hell of an information-gathering challenge, which we're trying to get to the bottom of so we can insinuate the Inuvialuit obligations into decisions that are made across the federal government on procurement decisions--many by Public Works, some directly by departments--when they're buying goods and services.

Public Accounts committee  There is a tendency, at the negotiating table, to put aspirational, unobjective language into the agreements, because you are moving from the old relationship, often within the Indian Act, to a new relationship, which is very important for that community. We've just done that with a number of British Columbia communities.

Public Accounts committee  No, not at all.