Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I'll start off by saying that a lot of the questions I've been asking other witnesses keep going back to the question of risk. Now, I can very much understand what you were saying to Madame DeBellefeuille about not having the engineering and so forth. That's not your department. But we had witnesses last week who were telling us that, no, no, this was a low-risk project, which it turned out not to be. We had witnesses the other week who said it was high-risk.
Looking back, there was, I believe, even before the MAPLE 2, the MAPLE X, which they decided not to go ahead with because it wasn't going to work. It was too risky, I guess, from the perspective of the late eighties and early nineties.
That said, I'd like to go to the Auditor General's report from 1998, dated April 2. On page 12 there's a section on capital construction. I'll give you a second to get there.
This is what it says here: “We audited AECL's management of two projects in early construction stages: the MMIR project in Chalk River to build two MAPLE reactors and a processing facility.... Both of these projects involve significant risk to AECL. MMIR has tight timelines and budgets and an unexpected regulatory event.” So in your 1998 report you noted that there was significant risk.
In your opinion, did AECL have the appropriate risk management tools in their corporation, in the culture, for this project, etc.? If they did, why? And if they didn't, why not? What should they have done at that point?
Now, this is just reference to one element of it.