How I think all of us envisage this is that there should be a committee, a properly established committee of the House and Senate. We are officers of Parliament, not just the House of Commons. It should operate in public. It should have a sufficiently well-staffed group to become familiar with the details of budgets. Committees that look at estimates don't traditionally have the time and the energy to get involved in the details of budgets. But a committee that's actually going to make recommendations for funds that are going to be binding during the pilot period on the Treasury Board of Canada needs to have proper support, and it needs to come in the planning cycle earlier. There's not much good having this done in October or November when, in our planning cycle, we can't get it into the main estimates. We can barely get it into the supplementary estimates at that point. So it needs to be done earlier in the process.
All officers of Parliament and the Treasury Board have agreed that we'll do an evaluation of the pilot project after the end of 2007-08, which is the second year of the pilot, and when every one of the officers of Parliament has been through the process. Now, only two officers of Parliament have been through it.
As I'm being critical, I'm trying to be positively critical in the sense that we need to have a proper evaluation before we really know whether this is something that's worth doing or whether this committee or another committee should do it.
