I'll open by saying that I don't really want to get into the politics of the Canadian debate.
But the observation I would make first is that the environmental work of the office in Canada is superb. For instance, the assessment of your nation's action on climate change in 2006 was an extraordinarily good piece of work. So that is clearly what can be done within your current structure.
I think the more important point to make is that auditing is just one of the powerful tools for the assessment of progress, the assessment of the intent of what governments do. The thing about trying to advance environmental sustainability and everything that flows from that is that it is so much wider that you need to have many more quivers in your bow. Choose your analogy. But you cannot rely—and nobody would pretend that you can—on all the constructs of good audit methodology, which Johanne and others in your commission used to a great extent.
So you need to think about what it is that you're trying to achieve with the office. As has my predecessor, I very much focus on the outcomes that we're trying to achieve, the differences that we're trying to make, and the complexities that we're dealing with.
The point that I really want to emphasize is that we absolutely agree with your Auditor General that you need to stay distant from the policy formation of the government of the day. We go to some length to do that, and there's no way that we view our role as policy advice to government. We very clearly position ourselves when we offer advice to select committees, which we do quite regularly, that it's advice to the select committee; it's not advice to the government. If we feel that we're getting what we call sucked into the government policy processes in any way, we step back, and make that step back absolutely explicit.
In 20 years, we've never created any conflict in the way we work. Do we comment on policy? Absolutely, we do, because at the end of the day you can't be outcome-focused without being able to comment on whether the policy was a good policy in the first place. Many of our pieces of work are quite focused on whether the policy was in fact a good policy in the first place, not simply on whether the policy was carried out in a way that was the intent of the original architects.
I'm not sure if that helps.