I'll go at them in reverse.
On the parliamentary officers, the Privy Council Office prefers to call them parliamentary agents because the officers are the clerk, the Sergeant-at-Arms, etc., but the common term is a parliamentary officer, so I'll use that.
I've often wondered if we shouldn't go the route of lumping them together instead of having so many discrete ones. For example, we could have a parliamentary commissioner and put under that the Privacy Commissioner, the Information Commissioner, the Commissioner of Official Languages, the Public Service Integrity Officer...I keep forgetting how many there are going to be, but a lot of them have fairly logically related functions. I think they'd work very well as one organization if Parliament were prepared to do it.
On the deputy ministers and ministers, I would be the first one to say that the boundary between administration and policy is not always clear. I think it is very clear in retrospect that it was the duty of deputy ministers to prevent the things that went wrong in the sponsorship program, or to ensure there were good records in the HRDC issue, or to ensure that the estimates were accurate in the gun control program, etc. The point of the recommendations is to make sure that over time, the area of responsibility and duty of the public servant is clarified, and that Parliament has some means of assuring itself that they obey their duties.
The public service has a legal identity, it has a statutory identity, and it has a responsibility to the laws that govern it--the laws that tell it what it may and may not do, and how it may do things. My concern is that more times than we need in Canada, the public service has not adhered to the laws it's supposed to respect. That causes a loss of faith in the public service; the ensuing scandals are harmful to government, harmful to the public service, and I think harmful ultimately to people's faith in how they're governed.
The final one, or the first, was on the Public Service Commission. As you will know, the Public Service Commission recently changed its role profoundly, from one of actually doing much of management to one of having an audit and accountability function. I've often thought that the Public Appointments Commission could comfortably fit within the Public Service Commission, although one--the Public Appointments Commission--is dealing with Governor in Council appointments and the other is dealing with the tens of thousands of routine appointments made every year to the public service in Canada, the promotions within the public service of Canada, the deployments, and everything else, so in that sense they have quite different clientele and a somewhat different function.
The Public Appointments Commission, as far as I can see, is modelled on the British Office of the Commissioner of Public Appointments. It oversees something between 3,000 and 5,000 appointments a year with a staff of ten. It does that through an ingenious method of having assessors who sit on appointment boards. This is for our equivalent of Governor in Council positions.
The point is that they have different clientele and would probably have different ways of operating, but in the sense that they're both trying to ensure the same standards in their different clientele, there is a logic for linking them. That's as far as I can go on that question.