Thank you. There were a number of questions there and I probably won't get them all, but I appreciate that Ms. Lee can come back to the ones that I missed. I will try to hit all the points that I have noted here.
Yes, it has taken a long time to get us to where we are and I think that was because what was required in order to have brought acceptance and support for this, as is often the case, was meaningful consultation. There were a number of rounds of consultation. Not only did the government go out and consult, but this Business Program Review Committee that was made up of people from the Development Corporation, the BCC and from RWED, went out and did extensive community consultation to understand what they felt they needed in terms of business programming and what kind of organization would best be suited to carry that out.
The other thing that was required -- and I pointed to this when we had discussions with Mr. Ramsay -- was minimal service disruption in the regions and on the ground for clients. It would have been very difficult to make wholesale changes to our programs and services and change the organization at the same time without disrupting service delivery. That was one of the principles that we wanted to assure our clients of. What this new legislation does is take a number of separate pieces of legislation and separate programs.
There is currently very prescriptive legislation around the BCC and the Development Corporation. We have programs like the BDF which will be harmonized and amalgamated under this new one piece of legislation, the programs that will flow from that. As I said earlier, this is enabling legislation. Even if there are significant changes required currently in regions, it can't happen given our BCC legislation and Development Corporation legislation. It required this legislative change and this enabling piece of legislation in order for that progression and evolution to take place in regions and in communities in terms of service delivery.
The comparison to the Power Corporation, I believe, in fact, that the Power Corporation CEO is not hired by the board but by the Minister involved. I could be wrong on that, but that was my impression. Our vision as a government, obviously, we have articulated in our strategic plan and must speak to this mandate. We talk about the need for a diversified economy, we don't want to be reliant solely on non-renewable resources development. We want to build up some of our other sectors, like tourism. We want to make sure that we have business programs that respond to individual needs on the ground and allow people to take advantage of the opportunities that they are now seeing.
That means an organization that is very flexible and very responsive. I think the Member well knows there are seemingly many different pots of money available through various federal organizations. We needed our business programming to realize that and be able to tap into some of that and to partner with some of those organizations. We are not that well set up to be able to partner with Aboriginal Business Canada, currently, but we will be under this new legislation.
We can develop programs that fit in and accommodate some of the other pots of money out there. In our challenged fiscal reality, that is something that we have to do. We can't expect our money to go very far if we are just talking about our money. We need to lever it with other sources of money. Thank you. If I have missed any of the points that the Member has touched on, she will remind me. Thank you.