Thank you.
That's an interesting question to pose to me after the time I've just spent at the Treasury Board, so let me elaborate a little bit.
First off, I think I've demonstrated throughout my career that I'm very respectful of both the relationships we have with ministers and the accountabilities we have to Parliament. I think I've demonstrated that my approach is to try to analyze an issue, find the right thing to do, implement it, and be as transparent as I can be about the pros, the cons, the warts, everything. I try to bring a more thorough understanding to an issue so that a proper decision can be made and implemented, and so that everybody can feel proud about themselves afterwards that they've exhibited complete professionalism in preparing that advice and carrying it out.
I feel that's been my personal contribution to not only the files I've worked on but also the people I have worked with to try to instill that spirit. Where something is awkward or difficult, we face it, we analyze it, and we do the best job we can as public servants. And I feel quite proud about that.
Secondly, you raised how one balances the trade-off of making sure we do our due diligence and are accountable and have processes in place to demonstrate that, being as efficient as we can and not getting in the way of things that need to get done. When I was at Treasury Board--a very short time--I was quite involved in an exercise that we called the “web of rules”, which is really, as you put it, rules for rules' sake.
Over time you can see these rules compound each other as people become more and more risk-averse. They say they don't want to take a decision that has an element of risk to it, so either Treasury Board is going to put a rule on them or the department is, or in some way they're going to stifle their ability to be innovative and to take the actions that are necessary, all the while respecting the reporting requirements we have and the due diligence.
The key to that going forward is taking an intelligent risk-management approach to those issues. If we're going to provide proper service to Canadians, we really do need to analyze the issue. We need to understand the risks. I'm not in favour at all of risk-ignorance. l think we need to understand the risks and find the best way to manage them. Sometimes that's going to mean devoting our resources to those highest-risk cases and making sure we're doing a good job, and sometimes it's going to mean, in very low-risk cases, that we might do things a little bit more efficiently or not put as many resources on it, and understand that mistakes may be made there--but hopefully not. Hopefully, there won't be any. If there are, we'd do our best to manage, contain, and recover from them.
I think there's scope, without losing any accountability or transparency, to actually just be a little bit smarter about the rules we have in place and the mechanisms. For example, as part of the web of rules exercise, we looked across the government at all the different reporting requirements we had, and we were able to eliminate quite a number of them without losing any information, just really recognizing that the same piece of information is collected in different spots.
I don't think you need at all sacrifice the integrity of the system by trying to do things in a more efficient, intelligent way.