On the opposition in 1995 to the creation of a separate office, there probably was some of that. But I recall that even more important than any internal opposition was the desire on the part of the government to not create a new organization. In 1995 we were in the middle of program review, and all departments were being cut back. I think there was a very strong desire to not create a separate office. That was perhaps one of the driving factors for asking us to take it on.
There is a group of people within the commissioner's office right now with very strong technical expertise on environmental issues and sustainable development. I think they're doing a very credible job. The rest of the group strengthens this smaller group in certain aspects. It strengthens them in normal evidence gathering and auditing. It supports your conclusions much more strongly in terms of communications and evaluation of results.
So I think the presence of the rest of the office, in my experience in the five years I saw it at work, gives the smaller group more strength, and there is better coverage of the whole government. You have over 600 people on the lookout for issues and feedback for the benefit of the commissioner. The point I'm trying to make is that the bigger office helps the smaller group.
We keep coming back to the issue of whether it would be more effective to have a separate stand-alone office. We use as examples other officers of Parliament, such as the Commissioner of Official Languages, the Privacy Commissioner, and so on. There are quite a number of stand-alone officers of Parliament both here in Ottawa and in other jurisdictions. I would suggest to the committee that if you analyze the impact of each one of those on whatever mission they have, it's not always what you might think it is.
I think there's a lot of frustration out there on the part of these officers of Parliament. When I was Auditor General, a number of them came to me and said they wished they had the influence I had in changing things. In other words, being alone is not always fun. They had their levels of frustration as well, and many times they envied the attention we were getting with our reports and our ability to move things sometimes.