Information & Ethics committee  Yes, definitely. The pandemic forced us to adopt new ways of working. We were fortunate that all my employees had access to their computers at home and everyone has been connected since last March. In addition, we have learned to live with new ways of working, including electronic signatures and electronic mail.

Information & Ethics committee  Yes, we finally received additional permanent funding last summer. That allowed us to plan to hire 27 new staff members, including 21 new investigators.

Information & Ethics committee  We hope so. It's really something that I wanted to do. The temporary funding that we had for the last four years allowed us to hire consultants, but we had to let them go at the end of the year. We were not able to keep our employees because we could not offer them permanent employment.

Information & Ethics committee  We were going to be short in location for 27 new employees, so we were looking at having extra rental space. However, because of the hybrid possibility and the flexibility that telework and working remotely are giving us, we see that we won't need the additional rental space, so the money will be able to be spent on people and on innovation in technology.

Information & Ethics committee  Thank you so much. Thank you for inviting me to appear before you today. It has been over a year since we last spoke, and I am pleased to be here to answer questions about my Office's portion of the main estimates. Generally speaking, in the past, our figures have not changed that much from year to year.