Just because parliamentary committees cannot assign or award sanctions against deputies doesn't mean that deputies don't take these appearances before committees seriously. I know them. I've interviewed the deputies. Over the years, I did work for the Lambert commission on financial management and for the Treasury Board on the reform of the supply process. I've done so many studies up here on Parliament Hill.
Perhaps this is the most frustrating part of the parliamentary process. You have this huge expanse of government spending sitting in front of you. You try to understand what it's all about, and it's not easily intelligible. You're doing it under the pressure of time and so on. So I think that some additional assistance, particularly in terms of scrutiny of department spending and operations from professional staff attached to the Library of Parliament, is appropriate. There may be another avenue of staffing, which I mention in the paper.
For the revenue side of the budget process, I think that really is open to serious political debate. It's something you want to talk about in very broad political terms—about what you stand for in terms of taxing and spending.
During those sessions when the deputy is present, I think the government has to be more relaxed in terms of saying that we can talk about some of the undiscussable issues to get to the bottom of why things don't turn out.
I've looked at performance reporting. We have hundreds of these reports now that are tabled. I looked at two years of estimates. I found two references to these performance plans and performance reports. It's depressing. All of those documents, both online and in hard copy, are produced presumably in the interest of promoting accountability. If they're not used—and they're not used internally either, to any great extent—that's a huge waste of money.
Other jurisdictions that I've studied—the U.K., Australia, and the leading states in the United States—have scaled back their performance reporting requirements. Why? Because they're not being utilized. It's depressing news, I'm sorry to tell you. So one of the key features of this new approach to accountability would be that we report on everything. But if the reports don't get used....
So yes, I want public servants to come here. Probably they need clearer rules of engagement for these encounters. I think public servants understand what their roles are. I think sometimes MPs cross the line in terms of taking public servants into areas that are more political, where public servants really shouldn't have a public opinion.
That was too long an answer. I apologize.