First, it's a great comment that you're making there, because when we do our own work plan.... We do have a work plan. We have an annual work plan, as you know, because we contribute to this committee on a regular basis twice a year and even more so in other circumstances.
We take that into consideration. We take into consideration how much time and resources we should dedicate to the Senate committees, because we also do some work there, and for individual requests from parliamentarians, both for senators and for members of the House of Commons. Implicitly, we try to develop a work plan that is a balanced work plan. We will continue doing it, and even if we have comments from other people, which we do.... I mean, we listen to people. In the fall, we did Nanos survey groups on Parliament in order to know exactly this. We did surveys with all stakeholders: parliamentarians, staffers, other independent agents of Parliament, and higher public servants.
We learned from these lessons and we applied some of them. For example, the public service said that we don't announce in advance what we do and so on. Now, since January of this year, all our reports are announced on our site three months in advance. Everybody knows that, in the next three months, at a tentative date, these reports will be published and public.
We do listen to parliamentarians. This is our job. We listen to all of them. We listen to the public service as well.
As long as you have a balanced work plan.... As I said, I have no problem with tabling a work plan and having a discussion with the Speakers of both chambers. On the approval, I would prefer not, because that creates a real big restriction, and even more so, I may add, during election time. Can you imagine the two Speakers in the year of an election with a PBO work plan that they will have to approve? I will tell you that in that year 50% of the resources will be dedicated to costing platforms, and I'm not sure the Senate Speaker will be really.... I don't know what the word is, but he will look at it and say, “That's a lot of time that you've spent on the other side.”