Canadian Heritage committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. We thank you for giving us this opportunity to meet the members of the committee and to discuss certain issues that we raised in our 2003 report on the protection of cultural heritage, and in our 2005 report on support to cultural industries. Accompanying

Canadian Heritage committee  As the member mentioned, we see that the departments and agencies concerned have taken the findings and recommendations of the two audits very seriously. A series of actions are currently being taken. Rather than state a finding, we prefer to go back and re-audit, which we'll do

Canadian Heritage committee  When there's a discrepancy, there are two ways of proceeding. You can increase resources or limit actions.

Canadian Heritage committee  We didn't do that kind of work. That would be a kind of comparative analysis, and we didn't do that. The departments and agencies may have some information on the subject.

Canadian Heritage committee  Yes, I'll be pleased to explain our mandate briefly. First, we are the auditors of the financial statements of the Government of Canada, but also a number of Crown corporations, including Telefilm. We do Telefilm's financial auditing every year. We also do what's called manageme

Canadian Heritage committee  No, unfortunately we haven't examined that issue.

Canadian Heritage committee  I would have to check the correspondence. That may be so. We receive thousands of letters every year, and I don't remember that one. I could enquire with the office and give the committee that information later.

Canadian Heritage committee  Unfortunately, I'm not aware of that. Perhaps the department is more aware than I am.

Canadian Heritage committee  In 2004, we raised certain problems. Telefilm's mandate was very limited at the time. Telefilm was carrying on activities in the audio, audio-visual and multimedia fields, and those activities were not part of its mandate at that time. So we pointed out to Parliament that that ma

Canadian Heritage committee  I don't believe we have.... No, we haven't.

Canadian Heritage committee  We don't generally look at that kind of aspect. We will look to see whether the funding being given meets the conditions of the program and is in accordance with it, but we don't monitor or try to assess whether it's distributed according to certain ridings or not. You might ask

Canadian Heritage committee  It's hard to answer based on simply two audits, but I would say the issues we found here were probably not atypical of other departments. I don't think we found any really serious management issues, which we sometimes see in other departments. The kinds of issues we saw here tend

Canadian Heritage committee  We certainly see that the department is taking it seriously, that they are addressing the recommendations we made. They agreed with us at the time and we do see that actions are under way. I guess we are cautiously optimistic. We like to wait to actually re-audit before we say if

Canadian Heritage committee  That's correct, only under the purview of the federal government.

Canadian Heritage committee  There was a new management of government information policy that came in at about the time of our audit, which was to address many of the questions of what documents should be conserved, for how long, the relationship with Archives Canada, but we found in this, I think, that cert