First, when you introduce a wide-ranging series of changes like this, there undoubtedly will be unforeseen consequences. But you could sit in this room all summer long and probably not predict everything that's going to happen. There will be unintended consequences. It's very hard, and I wish social scientists like yours truly had more wisdom to say how particular changes will reverberate throughout the system, how they'll have impacts throughout the system.
We want a public service that is a learning organization. We want creativity. We want innovation. We want prudent risk-taking. But every time a public servant makes a mistake, if we want to haul them before the committee, or we want to have the Auditor General pounce on them and report it, or we require that deputy ministers not buy their own notebooks to write down notes from their minister and things like that....
I mean, you can go overboard with this. I see the spokespersons for the government saying that they don't want excessive rules. I was a consultant to the chief financial officers association, which has been before this committee, on their most recent volume. I contributed to that. I think you can have excessive amounts of control and the government will never operate perfectly. There will be mistakes.
One of the problems is that we're trying to create a public service culture of prudent risk-taking in a parliamentary culture that is unforgiving in terms of mistakes. Those two cultures don't mesh. There's a tension there. I'm saying, have all the partisan debates you want over legislation and big budget issues, but when it comes to scrutiny of the operations of government, relax the partisanship, or find a higher quality of partisanship, which is more constructive.