Public Accounts committee  Mr. Chair, it's difficult to say because we have not had access to all the evidence needed it to confirm when National Defence realized that it would be impossible to install that equipment on the tanks. I'll speak a little bit in English, because some of the terminology is diff

Public Accounts committee  French is not my mother tongue.

Public Accounts committee  To be more precise, I don't want to give the committee the impression that we did not have access to the documents within National Defence. We did have access to all the documents needed. What I was trying to say is that as you go through the series of documents trying to put to

Public Accounts committee  Mr. Chair, I will answer the member's question by putting forward the facts as I understand them and as I understand the way we tried to place them here in this audit. The army had the Leopard 1 in theatre. It made a determination that because of the deficiencies--particularly w

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Mr. Chair, I can advise the honourable member that at the time we conducted this audit, Indian Affairs had shifted approximately $500 million from capital facilities, operations and maintenance, income assistance, housing, and post-secondary education to child and family services

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Yes, I'm afraid you'll have to go back to the department. We don't have that information with us. They will, though, be able to provide you with the information from which I quoted these particular statistics.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Mr. Chairman, we did not do that particular type of analysis, and as far as I understand and remember, neither did Indian and Northern Affairs Canada.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Yes, that's true. In constant dollars, per capita housing expenditures--at the time we had conducted this audit--had declined by 40% over a decade.

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Just in response to that, I agree, as the Auditor General has said, that when we talk about sustainability, we aren't just talking about the sustainability of the programs within Indian Affairs; it's also the sustainability of the very programs themselves and how decisions like t

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Mr. Chairman, I would echo the comments of the B.C. Auditor General. I would just bring to the committee's attention one particular community that we had a chance to visit in Alberta. They had taken on the responsibility for adoptions, which is not often a responsibility that i

Public Accounts committee  Mr. Chair, in exhibit 6.6, what you see set out here is the division of costs related to the Chinook helicopter, divided into parts. The first part relates to the capital costs related to the helicopter. You can see that in terms of the capital costs for the acquisition of the he

Public Accounts committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. There is really no need to apologize. Mr. Chair, thank you for the opportunity to meet with your committee today to discuss chapter 3 of the Auditor General's spring 2011 report about the reserve force pension plan at National Defence. With me today is Tom

Public Accounts committee  Mr. Chairman, certainly the introduction of a new pension plan requires a great deal of work. It's a complex undertaking, and if one hasn't done it before then, yes, it is going to be more difficult to do. However, what we found was that the reserve force pension plan was intro

Public Accounts committee  Mr. Chair, I would like to note for the committee that at no point in our audit do we suggest that the department should have waited to introduce the reserve force pension plan. The observation we have with respect to planning is that from our perspective, from what we saw when w

Public Accounts committee  Mr. Chairman, the information we have is that it takes between 80 and 100 hours to process these buybacks, in part due to the issue with respect to the records, which prior to 1999 were in hard copy, and which are very hard to retrieve or may not exist, resulting in the fact that