Public Accounts committee  As I've reported, we believe that some expenses—

Public Accounts committee  Give me a moment to look at the recommendation you just mentioned.

Public Accounts committee  As I said, the program was designed during the pandemic with very clear criteria. When a decision is made on a policy, the government is expected to adhere to that policy in implementing the program. In this case, there were very clear eligibility criteria. However, we found that these criteria were not consistently applied by all regional development agencies.

Public Accounts committee  Again, the criteria for eligible expenses were clearly established when the program was designed. However, the agencies didn't apply them consistently. That does increase risk, and, in our view, it contravenes both the policy and the program as designed.

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.