It's not actually radical when you consider the kind of world we live in now with the kinds of challenges and the kind of “new think” we need. It's not actually that radical at all. It's just radical for the old-time diplomacy at Global Affairs.
If an independent agency has the final decision-making, then parliamentarians wouldn't be implicated in it. The report would go to Parliament and they could debate the report. They could debate whether or not there should be new legislation and so on, but the individual decisions would be made by the independent agency.
An example, if you recall way back to the 1980s, would be the tainted tuna scandal, which led to the minister losing any right to overrule the findings of inspectors. Ultimately, that led to taking things like food safety out of Agriculture Canada, which was promoting food, and putting it into a separate discrete agency—the Canada Food Inspection Agency—which has that mandate.
That was done in 1997. It's not that we can't do these kinds of things. It's just that with diplomacy, sometimes in those areas these things are made to seem more difficult than they actually are.