Can you give a bit of history and/or an evaluation on the precedent of what we are doing here. Is it normal for either multiple committees and/or investigations and/or hearings to be going on simultaneously?
My concern here is that we have a process going on before the Ethics Commissioner. That's acceptable and understandable. Then a committee might have a responsibility to deal with that same issue. It doesn't seem to make any sense to me that we would be running parallel investigations at the same time.
A classic example would be when this committee discussed accrual accounting. It had already been before another committee, at that time the public accounts committee. The public accounts committee spent close to two years, on and off, on the evaluation of accrual accounting. I was on the public accounts committee at that particular point and I recall that. It was not being studied at the same time by the government operations committee. They reported their recommendations through Treasury Board, and at that point this matter came before the government operations committee. When it came before the government operations committee we saw the recommendations the previous committee had made had not been accepted to the degree that committee had wanted.
We further studied the issue, brought in more information, took the information from the previous testimony that had been given before the public accounts committee, and then made what we believed to be a very strong and convincing case to go back to Treasury Board to say that the first submission, although they listened to it, might not have been complete enough. So we added much more information and demonstrable evidence. At that particular point we were successful in at least putting forward a motion.
I know I am digressing onto another topic, but my thought process behind this is whether we're doing this as a government operations committee. Perhaps the Ethics Commissioner or another two or three committees wish to study this. Regardless of what the issue is, why are we all doing it at the same time? It doesn't make any sense to me. To be able to have an evaluation take place, to be able to take all that information that has been received and then, if we wish, to go to another investigation or another hearing, that's fine. Take all the information that has been accepted, rather than redo it all at the same time and haul in the same witnesses at the same time--unless you believe there are contradictions there. Then you have enough information to be able to assess and pass proper judgment.
To me that seems to be the normal course of activity here. Is that not a normal process the government seems to follow? Do you find that we have multiple attacks and/or investigations going on at the same time? Can you give us any history on that from your experience?