Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you, Madam Fraser. It's good to see you again, and we certainly appreciate your coming before the committee.
I have just a bit of commentary first, and I'd be interested in your take on it. Looking through this and hearing some of the comments that have been made--and certainly I'm supportive of strengthening any measures with respect to accountability--some of these items strike me as a little bit of placebo policy, for example, as they pertain to foundations. In the previous Parliament there was certainly an effort by all parties--in part through the committee that I was on, the public accounts committee, and Mr. Sauvageau was there as well--to address many of the concerns that you had raised with respect to foundations. In a bipartisan way we recognize that the concerns you put forward regarding foundations were legitimate. They needed to be addressed, and we tried to support you in that. Fortunately, the Treasury Board did implement substantive changes that essentially--maybe not totally--addressed all of the concerns, and now what we're seeing in this legislation that's been put forward is perhaps some tweaking or additions. What I'm seeing is that they're largely really additions that you would rarely exercise or implement. So I'm wondering to what extent those are redundant or might further complicate your role in the sense that your role tends to be one that needs to be highly focused. If there is an expectation by taking on these new roles, is that going to cause difficulty?
My bigger concern, though, in this process rests with the point that Mr. Martin made on extending your jurisdiction into first nations. I know this notion of creating a first nations auditor general is certainly laudable, and I think that's the direction we should be going in. I know that there's been extensive auditing that has already been occurring there, but I'm just wondering what your thoughts are on the potential for a conflict arising. If you had a first nations auditor general and you as auditor general also had responsibility for auditing the first nations, wouldn't that create some kind of difficulty in terms of who's at the top of that food chain and who's reporting to whom? Isn't it going to further undermine, in fact, the issue of autonomy? Maybe this is more of my own commentary than something you can say, but if the objective is to give more autonomy to first nations peoples, then aren't we undermining that autonomy by casting you into an area in which you yourself have said you would rarely use the authority given to you, if at all?