The Member is absolutely right: the secretariat was not in our priorities or mandate, and COVID-19 was not in our priorities or the mandate. I think, if it was, we might have changed our priorities and our mandates. However, we have what we have, so we go forward. Mr. Speaker, again I take ownership because some things we were trying to get off, we were trying to do, everybody was scrambling to make sure we had services in place, and we knew that some of the services on our side were breaking down. Things were coming really fast. The structures were not as good as we were used to. I made the wrong assumption and assumed on the other side that the structures were still the same, so we did offer to standing committee -- in fairness, it was buried between a letter that said, "This is what we're doing, if you'd like to see more about how we need to reorganize the structure." I take ownership for that; that's true, but we did offer one. It said, "We don't have a lot of stuff. We don't need this briefing." When it came back to me from my staff and they said, "We don't need the briefing," I said, "That doesn't make sense. How can they not need the briefing?"

Again, I would say it was buried in a letter, and I think it was misinformed. So we sent another offer to standing committee. At that time, standing committee accepted it and we presented. The normal process back in the day used to be that we would go to standing committee; we would provide the documents; they would give us feedback; we'd take it back; we would work on it; we would go back to standing committee, give the details, give and take; and then we'd go public. We didn't have the benefit of that. The first instance of going to standing committee, it was live, so we didn't have a very good communications plan. We didn't go to the public yet out of respect, due process, is that we usually work with our MLAs first. Again, I take ownership on our side, but I also say that we tried.