Government Operations committee  I think a number of consecutive governments have put in place more agents of Parliament that give tools to public servants to come forward and make disclosure. As you know, there is a disclosure—

Government Operations committee  Thank you, as always, for your question. I appreciate the way you always express your appreciation for the public service when you ask these questions. Just as an update, when I came to this committee last year, we at PCO were temporarily managing the funding, because the actual department had not yet been created.

Government Operations committee  Our role is supporting Minister Gould. We have a deputy minister who supports both Minister Gould and also Minister Chagger, as leader of the House. I don't have a specific budget for Minister Gould's support from PCO. I can tell you that the total cost of her minister's office, which is publicly disclosed, is around $1.3 million.

Government Operations committee  Absolutely. It's largely my team who has a role in ensuring that there is secure communication capacity in the government for cabinet, for the Prime Minister and others to have—

Government Operations committee  I won't get into specific concerns. I would simply say that it's important to always be proactively monitoring the threat environment and ensuring that our technology and our processes are up to speed to combat those emerging threats. With that in mind, we've taken steps through this to increase the reliability and the reach but also the redundancy of our secure communication capacity to make sure that, as much as possible, we can reach cabinet, the Prime Minister and those in key senior leadership positions within government anywhere they are in the world and be able to have the discussions that need to happen.

Government Operations committee  Looking back at budget 2016, we had a number of items that were brought in. There was $88 million over five years for IT projects. We invested in various projects to increase our hardware and increase the core infrastructure from an IT perspective. You'll see, starting this year, that each year we'll have a little less funding.

Government Operations committee  Keep in mind that we're comparing year over year, so it's just a decrease compared with what our main estimates were last year. This year our main estimates had under $7 million allocated for MMIWG because it was just those final few months of the year. Similar to last year, we anticipate that we'll reprofile some money that was unspent in previous years to augment that amount, but the intent is absolutely that everything will wrap up by the end of June.

Government Operations committee  I will add that I'm very passionate about this.

Government Operations committee  As you likely know, the Prime Minister took on the role of minister for youth in addition to being Prime Minister. The PCO, in supporting the Prime Minister, has a secretariat for youth and a deputy minister supporting the prime minister in that role. I would say, before I get to the outcome, that we have to talk about how we got there.

Government Operations committee  I don't know that I have any details on the youth gateway itself. That's how it is.

Government Operations committee  The protocol is about making a determination as to whether there is foreign interference and then taking steps from that.

Government Operations committee  As for what goes on behind the scenes in terms of investigation, I don't think it would be appropriate for me to comment, but I think on a case-by-case basis agencies and organizations beyond the five that are making that set of decisions—

Government Operations committee  I apologize. In my role, I don't have visibility into the process. I can simply say that, absolutely, the Chief Electoral Officer would be informed of any issues and would be briefed. There is a partnership that exists between the various organizations. This is very specific to how we alert the public to a critical incident that affects the election.

Government Operations committee  —would be involved in any type of investigation, any type of recommendations. This is really a decision-making body that has that final say. That's not to say that there's not involvement from other agencies that exist across government.

Government Operations committee  I can only repeat what I've already said.