Public Accounts committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. As I understand it, the proposed legislation would allow for the creation of regulations and the ability to bring into play provincial legislation that would provide a regulatory regime surrounding water on reserves for the first time. The concerns that we

Public Accounts committee  Certainly. Thank you, Mr. Chair. One of the things that I think is important to state, and we've stated it in our report, is that fundamental change is needed in how governments tackle the terrible conditions on reserves. Having said that, we also say that these are complex iss

Public Accounts committee  I'll give a bit of context; I've heard comments about there being new members. This piece of work was a follow-up to a number of audits that we've done over the years. At about the midway point of Madam Fraser's term, we did a similar follow-up on aboriginal issues, so we've do

Public Accounts committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. We appeared before your committee some months ago on the economic action plan, the first study we did of that, and one of our observations in that case was the fact that the government had done a good job of rolling out the program and doing the preparation

Public Accounts committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. I have a couple of very brief comments I would make. One is in the interest of clarification. Mr. Lake asked a question in relation to the audit process. I just want members to understand that we have a very vigorous process in all of our performance audit

Public Accounts committee  Mr. Chairman, thank you. I think there have been several references to a disagreement. In an effort to try to be helpful, I would sort of offer the following. Mr. Wernick introduced a notion that there was a respectful disagreement between us. That was a surprise to me. In the s

Public Accounts committee  I wasn't aware that I did, but I guess I do now. In all our audit reports we reach an agreement on the facts with the department, and we get it signed off before we table. I was actually of the view that the department's response to paragraph 3.85 was encouraging. I thought it wa

Public Accounts committee  That was correct at the time of the audit.

Public Accounts committee  That is a challenging question. I'll try to answer it in a couple of ways. I think the department was more successful in implementing what you might call transactional obligations, one-off obligations--for example, making the payments, transferring most of the land, and implemen

Public Accounts committee  Thank you. Mr. Linklater is not part of the Inuvialuit group. But yes, I visited many of the Inuvialuit communities. Between me and my audit team I think we visited all but one of the communities. We did talk with the leadership of the Inuvialuit Regional Corporation. It's part

Public Accounts committee  Mr. Chair, thank you for the opportunity to present the results of our audit of the Inuvialuit Final Agreement from chapter 3 of the Auditor General's October 2007 report. I am accompanied by Frank Barrett, who is the principal responsible for this audit. The Inuvialuit Final Ag

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  In relation to third-party management, we found in our audits that there is a need for the third-party manager to have an exit plan. There's got to be a concept of building capacity and having a plan right from the start, in terms of how does a third-party manager get out and lea

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Thank you. This is an issue that has shown up in our audit reports for some time, so when you talk about time-sensitive issues, this goes back to several audit reports over several years. Some of the systems are now in place, such as the point-of-service system. What we're looki

Indigenous and Northern Affairs committee  Mr. Chairman, we don't have any specific recommendations in that regard. One example given to us was in the case where legislation needed to go before the House in relation to land claims. Obviously by the time it got there, there was significant and meaningful consultation as