Public Accounts committee  The recommendations around those issues would actually come to the defence finance committee, of which the chief financial officer is a member.

Public Accounts committee  I think it's fair to say that we manage two kinds of risk. We manage operational risk, which is essentially one of the core accountabilities of the Chief of the Defence Staff; and we manage management-related risk, including the kind of risk that the Auditor General has referred

Public Accounts committee  Mr. Chairman, I thank you for that question, and then I'll turn back to the vice-admiral. When I started in this job two years ago, I actually struggled with the notion of capability-based planning, and it came down a little bit to this, as we tried to explain to our minister an

Public Accounts committee  Thank you for that question, Mr. Chairman. I'm not quite sure how to answer the question. I would go back and start with the National Defence Act, which clearly leaves accountability for resources with the civilian side of the organization, delegated from the minister to me--all

Public Accounts committee  On those issues, we're working with the Department of Finance and the Treasury Board Secretariat, and they have typically been sympathetic to re-profiles, especially of capital-related funding where we have known ahead of the curve and avoided any surprises. So on that money that

Public Accounts committee  Just very quickly, Mr. Chairman, it's not as though we've had no financial management framework. We have continued to work at identifying efficiencies, identifying gaps, and to work at them. We haven't landed up in exactly the place we would like to be. Again, given the kinds of

Public Accounts committee  There are just two things, very quickly, Mr. Chairman. First of all, I probably don't have to say it, but given the choice between an unhappy Parliament and an unhappy finance department, I know what side of that equation I'd like to be on.

Public Accounts committee  The other thing is that we do two things. One is that we actually do work with the Department of Finance on strategic re-profiling. If we know that we are funded in a particular year for a capital acquisition and we're not going to make that capital acquisition for some particula

Public Accounts committee  First, we brought ourselves into compliance with Treasury Board's policy on financial management and governance. We appointed a CFO for the first time in the organization. We did that in May. We then established a defence finance committee, which is the committee that is responsi

Public Accounts committee  Our management committee consists of 23 or 25 people. It is not, as a result, a decision-making body that can truly have effect. It is an organization that actually needs to own the corporate priorities for the organization and manage the corporate risks associated with those pri

Public Accounts committee  The Auditor General is absolutely right. Risk management is a challenge. Again, because we have typically managed from the bottom up, assistant deputy minister level, or L1 level by L1 level, we have taken on the aggregation of risks identified by those L1s and tried to manage

Public Accounts committee  Mr. Chairman, if I were a CEO of an independent private sector corporation, I'd probably say that it was causing some inefficiencies in how the organization was being managed in financial terms. That said, we are certainly not that, nor do we seek to be that. So in the context

Public Accounts committee  Let me start, and then, given my two years in the organization, I will perhaps ask the vice-admiral to speak to a little bit about the history. First of all, Mr. Chairman, I'd like to thank the member for his generous comments about our performance not being horrific in the repo

Public Accounts committee  Thank you for that question. Mr. Chairman, if I could just seek clarification, is the committee the member's referring to the defence finance committee?

Public Accounts committee  The defence finance committee is just the four or five people I referred to. The secretary is the chief financial official in his organization. We don't plan by region per se. We plan from the top down, given the government's overall direction and priorities. The decisions that