I guess the point I'm trying to make is that it's really Parliament and the committees of Parliament that dictate how successful any of these models will be. That is to say, if you make use of the information, if you bring forward the data in a venue like this, to debate and discuss the merit of programs around the table, then the new system will work.
Just creating a new office that collects more information won't make any large difference to improving the two objectives of this legislation: increased accountability and restoring trust in public institutions. That's what the government says is the purpose of this whole exercise.
According to my accounting in this exercise, we are going to create eight new agencies. The creation of new agencies alone does not necessarily guarantee that we are going to have more accountability. For your purposes, it's the use of the information that these agencies are going to collect that will be the measure of success down the road.
After some reasonable period of time--five years from now, for instance--it will be useful to look back and say, “Okay, with all of these new agencies and new mechanisms we've put in place, is it in fact true that the government is more accountable?” Frankly, I don't want to call it the weak point, but the point to which we've paid the least amount of attention is the way in which the members of Parliament will use the information.
I know there have been some fascinating pieces of work done by, for instance, the Treasury Board in recent years. These department reviews are submitted to you every single year. They list the intentions of every department, and then performance reports on what they accomplished the previous year are given to you. You got 91 of them last year from 91 different departments and agencies, but I suspect that Parliament has spent very little time holding the government to account for the success of any of these particular programs.
The data is there. More data isn't necessarily going to make the Government of Canada more accountable, so we have to find another way. I hope in your deliberations, as you work through clause by clause, you'll be inspired to find a way to make use of the information, both old and new.