Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
And thank you, Mr. Isaacs and your colleagues, for being here.
I want to follow up a little bit on what my colleague, Mr. Murphy, has pursued in terms of the role of the financial officer through the deputy minister. You used the term “embedded”, that financial officers should be embedded in the process of program development and program evaluation—I'm actually putting it in those terms, although you didn't quite say it that way. I think this term “embedding” comes from the media recently being embedded on military fronts to provide balanced commentary from those fronts. In that sense, we're in the same kind of an action, trying to get a balanced commentary on program evaluation.
The problem I have is, how do you embed financial officers in a system that, under the terms of the legislation, has the accounting officer through, I would think, an internal audit function with an internal audit committee...? I would think that a financial officer should be part of that internal audit committee. But internal audit reports to the Comptroller General. It seems to then take another course in terms of the evaluation, as opposed to taking course changes within a ministry, within a particular role.
Could you expand on that a bit in terms of how a financial officer could be better utilized in program evaluation and how that could provide a course direction that would be more immediate and more within the committee structure and the oversight structures of Parliament?