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.

Public Accounts committee  I'm not sure I could answer that. I don't know, Carol, if you have a question...whether you looked at hotel enforcement in other jurisdictions. Can you add to that?

Public Accounts committee  I'm going to try to answer on all of those details, and Carol can jump in if I misspeak. I don't think it's a clear analogy that 400,000 tests divided by two equals 200,000, because one individual may be missing both tests or only one test, so it could be a slightly different number than 200,000.

Public Accounts committee  There were 8,000 travellers who tested positive, and approximately 1,156 had not been contacted about that positive test.

Public Accounts committee  That was in 2021. That's correct.

Public Accounts committee  I believe that Dr. Kochhar may be in the best position to answer that, but there was a set of criteria given to individuals to assess, based on their answers and so on, as to whether or not they were at high risk of non-compliance. As you noted, there was an improvement in the ability to refer individuals to law enforcement and an improvement in the agency's following up with individuals, but still, 59% of those referred were not followed up on by the agency to know whether or not they were properly quarantined.

Public Accounts committee  I think that's an excellent question to ask the department, as to how they weighed the pros and cons in administering the COVID testing protocols.

Public Accounts committee  We didn't identify an issue like that, where taxis were being reimbursed, but we did not do a detailed audit of the $342 million.

Public Accounts committee  You're correct that this was our second audit. The first audit covered March to June of 2020. Where we did note some improvements from the Public Health Agency was in its ability to contact travellers to determine whether or not they were quarantining. In the first audit, we found that they were unable to follow up with 66% of travellers.

Public Accounts committee  Obviously we didn't focus on rural Canadians. What we did was look at whether or not the Public Health Agency had worked through that sort of cohesive enforcement regime. As we've been saying this morning, that wasn't thought through when the measures were put in place. Having clear guidance that's well understood comes with good monitoring and a good enforcement regime to ensure that it's being followed.

Public Accounts committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. In this case, we did not look at the IT system and whether it was operating effectively, and we did not look at the complaint resolution. We were looking to determine whether or not the agency could explain to us whether these border measures were effective at limiting the spread.

Public Accounts committee  We currently don't have any plans to look at other border measures. That is considering where we are in the pandemic. That can obviously change as we move forward. We monitor the environment and make decisions based on that. When it comes to speaking with Canadians directly, we found in other audits that there's sometimes a hesitancy to want to speak to us, especially when it's a very personal matter.