Finance committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. Good afternoon, members of the finance committee. I would first like to thank all of you for your important work and for giving me the opportunity to answer your questions here today on the implementation of the Canada student service grant. Let me start

Finance committee  I believe, Mr. Chair, that the Prime Minister not only accepted the invitation, and was pleased to come before the committee, but that originally the invitation was for one hour, which he accepted, and then he extended his time and stayed for just over 90 minutes.

Finance committee  I believe that is perhaps a discussion for another time, Mr. Barrett.

Finance committee  First of all, when you suggested there was an admission in his remarks and his answers to your many questions earlier, I want to correct you by saying that he said this to Canadians some time ago. I believe the Prime Minister and our entire office and government take ethics extre

Finance committee  I actually read the act before that, but when you say that's.... Again, you're suggesting the reason we're going back and forth with the Ethics Commissioner's office was for reasons that.... Yes, that was the case, but we also go back and forth with the Ethics Commissioner's offi

Finance committee  I looked into this. There were a handful of interactions with the Prime Minister's Office and the WE organization around the Canada summer student grant between then and the launch of the program. There was only one prior to the launch of the program. It was in early May, when on

Finance committee  I believe it was on May 5.

Finance committee  I was a member of the policy team.

Finance committee  It's public information who all the staff in the Prime Minister's Office are, and I am here to represent all of those staff, as the senior-most member of the Prime Minister's Office. If you have questions about any of them, or for any of them, I am happy to take them today.

Finance committee  I want to address two things you said. First, no one is throwing anyone under the bus. I am explaining, and I am happy to explain, what happened. We relied on the public service and their recommendations, and their recommendation was to proceed. The question you're asking about

Finance committee  On May 8, we first learned that the WE organization was being proposed as the organization to deliver and administer this program, so that is when we spoke about it.

Finance committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. That's actually one of the things my team and I have been reflecting upon in this last period of time, whether additional rigour could be put in place even in a time of crisis. Our focus, for the reasons you mentioned and the reasons I gave in my opening

Finance committee  Especially at this time, everyone was rolling up their sleeves and working on a number of different projects at once, and various departments were supporting each other with their work in truly unprecedented ways. What ultimately comes to cabinet is a memorandum to cabinet that

Finance committee  The April 5 conversation I referred to was a relatively brief conversation, but it does, I think, summarize an answer to what you're asking. We talked about the fact that there were gaps in our existing programs and that key parts of our population weren't yet getting the support

Finance committee  Mr. Chair, I have to reject what the member is saying about what happened here, other than his opening comments, which were that the Prime Minister did have concerns at the meeting on May 8 when he was first briefed on this. He said that he wanted to get more information by way o