Mr. Speaker, as usual the member for The Battlefords-Meadow Lake has quickly identified the Achilles' heel.
I can only indicate to him, drawing from my own experience, that when one goes to cabinet with a proposal one does not always get everything one wants. That applies also to committees. We did our best. We produced a report that we knew at the time was aiming a bit higher than the commitment made in our red book.
As they say in political jargon: "You win some and you lose some". Because of this I started my remarks pointing at the fact that the Auditor General Act will now be changed in its title. It will also be changed to include a new mandate. While it is not all we would have liked, as the parliamentary secretary said earlier, it represents a solid step in the right direction. It is my hope that once the commissioner has proven his or her merits within the governmental organization and has proven through monitoring and reporting this is an extremely valuable role, the commissioner will be given the additional role of indicating, beyond reporting and monitoring, what the shortcomings are of a given policy, which is a very delicate step as we know.
In committee I remember very clearly the auditor general warning us about giving this additional responsibility to the commissioner. I suppose it is good to start with what we have now even if it does not meet all of our expectations. We can build on the foundation through experience in the years ahead.