We certainly welcome this committee. It's been a major step forward for all officers of Parliament. As you can see from our experience last year, for the first time we were on a proper financial footing. We were given an increase of almost 47% in our budget. That being said, the major issue for officers of Parliament is when governments of the day, especially majority governments, have issues with officers of Parliament, how they can be insulated from having that impact on their budgets.
There is one feature of the new ad hoc panel that is troubling to the Office of the Information Commissioner and some other officers of Parliament, and that is that it operates in camera. While that worked very well with a minority government situation, as it was last year, in a majority government situation, with an ad hoc panel, the only protection for officers of Parliament is their public. That's the beauty, of course, of committees like this: they operate largely in public in dealing with resource requests.
So with that caveat, and also some issues around the timing of when the committee meets, which is mainly administrative, we certainly consider it a positive development.