For years several parliamentary agents have expressed discomfort with the fact that they are accountable to Parliament and yet are subject to the executive in funding their mandate. The whole concept of the panel, which was brought in in 2004, was to try to alleviate that.
In fact, agents of Parliament are now more accountable because of this, because the submission has to be reviewed by a parliamentary panel and the Treasury Board Secretariat before it's translated into a supplementary estimate at the Treasury Board. So there's a challenge function from the secretariat, there's a challenge function from the panel, there's a challenge function from Treasury Board ministers when they look at it, and then of course there's your challenge function as part of the supply process.
I think the panel was a great improvement. It brought transparency to the process. I don't think there's a procedure provided for Treasury Board to feed back to the panel a decision that is different from the recommendation, and that may be a flaw in the model.