Thank you, Chair.
Welcome, Mr. Marleau. You've spoken about the parliamentary budget officer. That's one more of a growing list, as this bill expands it further, of parliamentary officers. Of course, 30 years ago we just had the Auditor General, then the information and privacy commissioners, and now we have a number of further ones.
This relates to your very useful suggestion of extending the parliamentary budget officer's mandate to cover estimates. A tension exists between these parliamentary officers, whose role is fundamentally to--as they're called--“assist” members of Parliament in doing their job. They extend the reach of an individual member of Parliament. The concern is that it becomes self-limiting, that at some stage we have so many independent parliamentary officers that we're creating a parallel universe between the executive and the members of Parliament. What is intended, properly, to be an assistance becomes a buffer.
I don't know the answer to this. I used to be one, and I highly value the role they can play in assisting members of Parliament and the public in holding the executive to account, but I am concerned about the proliferation. At some point, the public, and perhaps the public administration and the news media and everyone else, will be a little confused about who's responsible for what in these independent roles, which really aren't to be independent; they're supposed to be subordinate to Parliament.
It's this relationship that I'm interested in your reflections on.