Public Accounts Committee — Department of Industry, Trade and Technology, the Canada-Newfoundland Strategic Investment and Industrial Development Cooperation Agreement, again an issue that the Auditor General looked at in her 1996 annual report. I guess we will proceed directly to the questioning, and I will certainly ask members to my immediate right. Mr. Whelan, would you like to start? MR. WHELAN: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Before we really get into any line of questioning, there are a couple of things I noticed in the report that sort of left me hanging to some degree. I suppose before we go any further, unless we get it cleared up, it sort of probably takes away some credibility from the department or the Auditor General's office. I notice here the Auditor General mentioned on page 3 of our book: "The Committee did not comply with the Agreement in the following respects: The Agreement was not properly administered as funding of programs was not adequately controlled, managed or monitored in accordance with Agreement requirements. For example...," and she lists a number of examples. The response from the department was: "Information to substantiate this was provided to your auditors and for some reason it continues to be ignored." I would like to have that cleared up. It goes on, on page 4: "In order to determine whether the program achieved what it was expected to achieve, the Agreement required that a plan for evaluating the programs and program elements be developed and also that an evaluation framework be developed by December 1992. As at 31 March 1996, no comprehensive evaluation of the Agreement had been planned and no data had been accumulated which could be used to measure the Agreement's impact." The response from the department, on page 5, was that: "There was an evaluation framework prepared by the management committee in 1993 and this was given to your staff. It is the committee's view that compliance with the Agreement has been achieved and that suffi