There's hope. There may be hope for us yet.
So accountability is fundamental, and I've defined accountability many times as a force beyond the control that causes you to think and act in a certain way.
Now, what kind of force should we be? We are a political body within the Parliament of Canada. We're a political institution. We have political accountability. The sponsorship situation was the best example. The Gomery inquiry was there to elicit the facts, and witnesses were in front of the Gomery inquiry until the lawyers were happy that they had elicited all the information they could squeeze out of the witness before they would move on to somebody else. Here, of course, we have our four minutes or eight minutes, and then we move onto something else. But we have political accountability.
The witnesses are here, not in any way, shape or form to make them feel good—and I am not into exit strategies to find out how good they feel when they leave, because I don't think that is our job—but we're here to hold them accountable. They may go back to their departments and have a little bit of shell shock and be afraid to take the initiative by virtue of the fact that they're held publicly accountable, but this public accountability in a democracy is fundamental. It is fundamental to the minister and the ministry and the deputy minister, and so on.
If they know that they're going to show up here and have to answer for failures in a report by the Auditor General that is clear, concise, and non-partisan, and just puts the facts on the table and allows us as a political accountability committee to deal with them, it can be a daunting challenge. I did hear of one deputy minister who, upon returning to her office after having been here at the public accounts committee, said to her staff, “Never let that happen to me again.” Of course, the way it would never happen again is if you get a complimentary report from the Auditor General, that all is well. It's a motivator.
Our job is to inform the Canadian public on what our bureaucracy and our government are doing. If they're coming up short, our people need to know about it and we exact political accountability--not judicial accountability, because that's for the courts, and again the sponsorship inquiry actually ended up in the courts for some people. We deal with political accountability, and that's a different concept. Governments in a democratic society, where the media is open and transparent, don't like to be embarrassed. It costs them votes. We saw what happened before: when it costs you votes, you lose seats, you lose power, and that's deemed to be a detrimental thing. It's accountability, and the public accounts committee has to be that force beyond the control of government that exacts this accountability. That's why it's important that we act in a unified fashion, so we don't just break down into partisan party positions, because then the committee becomes ineffective.
Tenure, I think, is always important, not just in this committee but in every committee. Tenure, or longevity, allows people to develop not only the expertise but the reputation that they, as a member of Parliament, sit on this committee and have become a spokesperson and an expert on whichever committee they sit on. The longer they do that, the more they're recognized for their expertise and the more they develop expertise. It's a training ground for potential cabinet ministers, if the party ever wins power, and so on. So I think committee tenure is important.
Ministers as members, which we have in some jurisdictions, I find anathema. In fact, at the very first Canadian Council of Public Accounts Committees that I went to, many years ago--and I was naive in those days, Mr. Chair, but maybe not quite so naive today--in one particular jurisdiction the Minister of Finance was the vice-chair of the public accounts committee and set the agenda. If you ever saw a conflict of interest, there is a conflict of interest: the Minister of Finance setting the agenda for the public accounts committee. It cannot be.
Remember, Parliament's job is to hold the government accountable, government being the executive--the Prime Minister or the Premier, and the cabinet. That's the government, not the governing party but the government. Our job as a PAC is to hold them accountable. If a member of the executive says, “No, you're not going to take a look at that, that's where all the scandals and skeletons are hiding”, then how effective can we be as a public accounts committee? So get ministers off public accounts committees everywhere.
We're also not going to rate ourselves, but I think we are between our provincial counterparts and some of our counterparts in other countries. But at one point, there are some countries and perhaps even some provinces where actually the public accounts committee meets in private. I've actually had the privilege of attending some public accounts committees in other jurisdictions, and I remember a particular one where the auditor general was presenting a problem about their paying to rebuild a road, but the road had only been repaved, resurfaced. The committee was in private and the members said, “Oh, shucks, isn't that awful. Next subject, please.” They would never have gotten away with that if they had met in public and if they had been broadcast on television so that the public who elected us could understand and could hold us accountable for our effectiveness on the committee.
It's this whole concept of our being accountable to the electorate and holding the government accountable, and so on.
I can see I could wax eloquent for some time, Mr. Chair, but I see the signs that time moves on and I'll leave it there.