Public Accounts committee  That means companies must repay any assistance provided to them. “Unconditionally” just means it's not an option.

Public Accounts committee  As I mentioned before, we put a report on the web. As highlighted by the Auditor General, there was no one place where all the information was together. A report was posted in December 2014, which essentially highlights all the funds that went into the restructuring, as well as a

Public Accounts committee  Fine. As I already said, we are in favour of the recommendation. It is important to see whether the program's objectives were reached. We carried out a preliminary assessment in 2012 to see whether we were on the right track and would reach interim objectives. The result of tha

Public Accounts committee  From my perspective, I think the audit did make me refamiliarize myself with the information that we did have. My assessment is that the comprehensive information was sufficient to be able to make the decisions at hand at the time.

Public Accounts committee  I'll maybe take a quick second to remind that the automotive innovation fund is about trying to ensure that we support research and development and innovation in the auto sector. When projects are developed by companies and they seek support by the federal government for those in

Public Accounts committee  I'll attempt to answer that question. What I iterated before was that we were working toward very tight timelines that were essentially tied to the fact that these companies in the United States were under bankruptcy protection, and we really had to restructure, under very tight

Public Accounts committee  What I can say about the automotive innovation fund is that in 2012 we did evaluate the program. The evaluation did show that it was meeting its short-term and medium-term objectives, but it was too early to tell whether it was going to meet its long-term objectives. We've comm

Public Accounts committee  Unfortunately, most of the details of the commitments are commercially confidential. However, the commitments that were put in place were really about trying to anchor those companies and their operations in Canada. As I've mentioned a couple of times now, commitments from both

Public Accounts committee  The last point is just to say that on the regulatory side as well as in terms of exports, those are both areas in which Canada has seen improvement and has been seen as being increasingly attractive as a place to invest.

Public Accounts committee  Participating in the overall restructuring of GM and Chrysler was necessary to protect the Canadian automotive sector at large, which I said in my opening remarks. With most of the production exported to the U.S., the events that were south of the border were affecting Canadian

Public Accounts committee  Maybe I'll answer the last question first, which is that there is no federal equivalent to the automotive innovation fund in the U.S. The support that takes place in the U.S. in terms of attracting automotive investment is at the state level. That's usually a combination of eithe

Public Accounts committee  It is.

Public Accounts committee  It is completed and is now posted on our website, as of December 2014.

Public Accounts committee  It will be completed by the end of this year.

Public Accounts committee  I'll clarify that the department has always used, and continues to use, a risk-based approach when it assesses projects. As noted in the Auditor General's report, we did not have that approach properly documented. As of October of last year, we've now included that explicitly in