Public Accounts committee  Yes. I'm answering. First of all, we didn't gag him, because we gave him all the information he needs to develop his own analysis. There was nothing there that was actually not provided to Yves Giroux. That's the first thing to say. Now—

Public Accounts committee  What we told them was that we requested them not to—

Public Accounts committee  [Technical difficulty—Editor] because the information had not been vetted in terms of protections from a legal perspective—it could be protected under a certain act—and also because it was never released. We asked him to not release it. We gave him confidential information and said use it for your analysis.

Public Accounts committee  No one instructed me—

Public Accounts committee  Advice of the department; and to be fair with you, this is something we've been doing for years.

Public Accounts committee  No. Those are two different—

Public Accounts committee  No. It's not the same question.

Public Accounts committee  The other question—

Public Accounts committee  This information has nothing to do with the net-zero accelerator. This is information coming from Environment Canada. This is not cabinet. We never pretended it was cabinet confidential. What we said was that the information, as you read in the letter, was unpublished. That's what we said.

Public Accounts committee  As I said before to your colleagues, there is due diligence to be made in terms of whether it is information that should be protected under certain legislation—

Public Accounts committee  In the—

Public Accounts committee  We are accountable.

Public Accounts committee  This is the accountability under the Federal Accountability Act—

Public Accounts committee  There's more than one legislation that actually manages confidentiality. So yes, we have to do the due diligence, and ultimately it's a decision that governments can make—

Public Accounts committee  I answered the question.