Public Accounts committee  The minister asked me, as I said earlier, questions about the findings of the Auditor General. I have yet to personally speak to her about that practice, to be fair.

Public Accounts committee  On this specifically, I have not, no.

Public Accounts committee  Honestly, I don't have any comments on the motion. This is outside my pay grade here, so I'll let the system take care of itself from that perspective.

Public Accounts committee  We're always looking to improve on the system. I think it would be a mistake not to do that. In this particular case, my comments were to the effect that, as the Auditor General mentioned, the rules were not followed here, so that's different. I have 30 years' experience, and b

Public Accounts committee  Sends the cheques...?

Public Accounts committee  No, no. No, not at all. The department would approve the actual payment under section 34, so there's someone who validates. Then the cheque printing is actually done by the Receiver General—

Public Accounts committee  Listen, the Auditor General went through the files. She did an audit. She found that she wasn't able to trace all the financial records, so no, I don't, obviously, or else I would have given it to her.

Public Accounts committee  Again, the responsibility lies with the contracting authority. That said, these are indeed situations that we're monitoring. In my experience, these were questions that the deputy minister asked himself when these contracts were proactively disclosed. We were trying to determine

Public Accounts committee  I don't know if there's a problem. Certainly, during the pandemic, these tools were used for various reasons. I haven't done an in‑depth analysis of it, so I can't tell you if there really is a problem. However, what I can say is that, in general, we're looking for competition.

Public Accounts committee  We actually have it for our department. Earlier, we told you that we would send you the justifications for using this mechanism.

Public Accounts committee  Honestly, I'm not going to comment on that, to be fair. What I can say is that, sadly, when there's a finding of this nature through an audit, it does shake up the system, and that's normal. As I said earlier, a lot of people do a fantastic job, and they've built a great reputat

Public Accounts committee  Obviously, financial resources are important if you're going to deliver on programs, but, as I said before, departments are allocated a budget, and they have to make decisions as to how they're going to utilize these resources to deliver their programs in the most effective way.

Public Accounts committee  I'm not an HR expert or a labour relations expert. Based on my experience of what I've seen, if malfeasance happened and information was genuinely discarded to hide something, for example, it could go to dismissal for sure.

Public Accounts committee  I would like to clarify. If there's an audit and something major is found, you should take crap for it, honestly. What I meant to say is that audits are instruments that allow us to find weaknesses, and we should respect that and take the measures to deal with it. The department

Public Accounts committee  First of all, when departments introduce proposals for reductions, they have to understand the impact and how they are going to implement them, and they have to understand how they're going to minimize impacts on the delivery of their programs. On your aspect of recruiting peop