Thank you. On the issue of merit pay, merit pay is done by myself and for deputy ministers it is done by Liz Snider as secretary to Cabinet. She brings the recommendations to me. We discuss them and we give them. Nobody else does that. All the deputy ministers are done by myself and Ms. Snider. For the principal secretary and the chief of staff, they work for Cabinet; I do that. I discuss it with Liz Snider, secretary to Cabinet, and we look at the performance of all the deputy ministers, all the senior managers in government and that is how it is done.

I have said in this House before, so you can at least accept that I am not saying it just because I want to now, I have always held Mr. Bayly in the highest esteem, and so have you. He is hard working, he is a man of integrity who admitted a mistake.

Lynda Sorensen, hard working, a long record in government in the public service without any blemish, none whatsoever. She put long hours in. Her work was exemplary.

Both of these individuals worked together as a team. High stress, long hours and they performed their job extremely well. We gave other deputy ministers maximum performance merit pay because they also performed outstanding work. So when you put it all together they were a group of senior managers that we felt did exemplary work. Some were considered very well, some perhaps did not deliver as well as they could have, so they were not rated the same.

We had an order from the Special Committee on Conflict Process that we were not to talk about this issue or do anything that might be construed to interfere with the deliberations and the issues before this committee. We could not talk about it, could not take it into consideration, so set that aside.

Having said that, it is true. The issue was there. I discussed the taping incident with my staff and I said in this Legislature that it was my idea to issue the letters of reprimand. I issued them because I thought this is important to acknowledge that there was a concern there. How far could I go? I could not ask them about it, I could not talk about it because the committee said, "Don't talk about it." Joe could not talk to me about many things. I could not talk to the staff, I could not talk to you.

There was this difficulty that was created. The staff acknowledged that it happened. They made their regrets. I accept that, but I could not put the consideration and say, "Look, I have..." and then go contrary to the committee and say, "Because of what happened in this and that, I am not going to give you what I think you deserve. " I could not do that. That is where the performance pay is. That is why it is there.

It is not because I am friends with John and friends with Lynda. It is because they performed a job at a level compared to the best and highest performing DMs we had at that time. That is how I considered it.

For the letter of reprimand, the staff said they did not think it was warranted, and certainly because we could not talk about it, what could we do? I just said, "Look, they admitted to it. They admitted a mistake was made." To this day I still believe that Lynda did not see the taping because if she had, she would have seen me.

So, that is what we had. It is important for me to tell you how I saw that at that time, and that is how I see it. Responsibility was taken, it was done. The committee was going to deal with it. The committee has said as far as they are concerned she did something seriously wrong and so that is what happened.

This Legislature accepted the recommendations of the committee. We now find the Supreme Court to say that committee made some serious mistakes. We are not talking about that yet, but we should because it is connected.

It is true that we should account for ourselves and I appreciate the fact that Members have allowed me to do that. It is important, before you draw your conclusions as I said earlier, to decide to convict me and to restore integrity and dignity to this Legislature, we have to follow due process. There has to be some process that we take.

We have to be fair to our employees. That is a legal duty we have. We have a legal duty to do that. I look back on what happened and ask myself, would I have done something different? I must tell you, sure. Maybe I should have approached the performance appraisal differently with John and with Lynda.

I acknowledge that I could have done that differently. There is the issue of the policies that we have. Were they followed? The Auditor General says we did not. Okay. As a Cabinet we said, "Let's sit down and look at it and see. What is the practice we want when we have termination packages? What are the policies and let's review them." Prepare to fix, if we want to build something constructive out of this, we are prepared to do that.

I acknowledge we did it quickly and I acknowledge I would have done it differently. We could have said just give her a month for every year of service, but that is it. Let her take us to court. I could have done that. Would that have been more acceptable to you? We would have gone to court. She might have got one additional month, she might have got 12 months. We do not know that. What we know is that we would have spent an estimate of at least $50,000 in the courts on our side alone. If we lost, which we thought we would lose because we eliminated her job from her, that we would lose. The courts are absolutely clear on that. When you do away with somebody's job when they are still in it, they take you to court and they win every time.

Mr. Chairman, can I continue?