If you're talking about a policy advocate, I think that is one of the issues. There is a tension between policy advocacy and the audit function. I think the Auditor General dealt with that issue when she appeared before the committee recently, and so did the former Auditor General, Mr. Desautels.
From a machinery perspective, I don't have advice on this, because we really have not looked at this in any depth, since it's a very recent issue that developed less than a month ago. I think one of the big questions from a machinery perspective that we do ask when there's a proposal on the table is that the form has to follow the function. So the question is, what do you want? What are you trying to do, and what outcomes are you trying to deal with, and what's your diagnostic of what's not working now? To me, clarity around that then helps you figure out, from a machinery perspective, what are the various technical aspects, or what are the various possibilities from a structural perspective that can make you deliver on this?
So the starting point is this: what's the public policy goal, and what's the definition around advocacy, and what do we mean by that?
I found the testimony of Mr. Williams very interesting, because he described his advocacy role in a pretty interesting way. He said he focuses on tilling before there's actual policy formulation. I think there still is a question about what you mean by advocacy before you can decide how you can best put a form around that.