Fisheries committee  We have not done anything specific on it. In our audit we identified what criteria we used to deal with the protection of marine mammals, so we looked at the tools that the federal government has, the policy on managing bycatch. They have the Species at Risk Act. They have marine

Fisheries committee  Absolutely.

Fisheries committee  The deputy minister signs off that everything in our audit is factually accurate. That's the ultimate accountability. In the meantime, we must go back and forth for months before we actually land on something that everybody can agree with.

Fisheries committee  Have we looked at the protection of marine animals before?

Fisheries committee  I do not believe we have. I believe this is our first audit on this issue. Is that correct?

Fisheries committee  Yes, I'm pretty sure. Our office has been around for 20 years, so I don't know all of them off of the top of my head, but I don't believe we have actually looked at this issue in the past.

Fisheries committee  That's a great question. We were looking at another topic, I remember, that somebody had brought forward. Do you remember how we got there?

Fisheries committee  That's correct.

Fisheries committee  Technically it's actually your job to do that, to hold the departments accountable. Parliament develops the rules and sends them down to the government. The auditor comes in and checks whether the government is doing their job and reports back to Parliament. Technically, Parliame

Fisheries committee  They're going to say, most likely, that it was a resource constraint issue, because everybody says that every time we go in and audit them. That's not necessarily an issue that we bring forward.

Fisheries committee  That's a great question. I can only audit what you've asked them to do, and whether or not that's something that they can do or not is really something the department has to answer. We do ask a lot of our civil servants. I would also say that in our audits, we tend to very quic

Fisheries committee  It's really a question of our resources as to how many issues we can deal with at one particular time in that audit period. It's really dependent on the size of the team. We pick the biggest risks that we can see. That's how we select.

Fisheries committee  It's determined by the audit team and we have conversations with the department.

Fisheries committee  And external advisers. We have specialists we speak to, to help us figure it out. Normally with the scope, what often happens is we're presented with a menu of different issues that we could select, but they say we can only do two or three of them. So it's which two or three. We

Fisheries committee  Our staff does it as part of the research in the planning phase of an audit.