Thank you very much, Madam Chair.
It's a privilege to be on this committee today. By the way, I have a lot of time on the public accounts committee with Mr. Holland. He has been there for many years as well, so we have some shared experience.
I always liked the public accounts committee. We may have gone off on some partisan tangents here and there, but it's a committee where people generally work together to try to bring some accountability to government and improve government in the long term.
And I think this committee was a very good idea, because it's the system that has to be studied. It's the system that delivers services and programs to the people. It's not a blame game. In most systems it isn't the people who are the problem; it's fixing the system. Government operations was designed to examine the system, not individuals and getting into a Star Chamber-type procedure where you're trying to find blame and play partisan games.
It's unfortunate that reports aren't being done. Work is not being done on important things like the turnover problem and maybe the demographics problem we're facing in the country. We spent a lot of time in public accounts on accrual accounting with the Auditor General. We're all quite concerned that there hasn't been as much progress in getting the public service of Canada in line with the rest of the world in using accrual accounting in reporting financial operations.
It's really unfortunate that this committee seems to be preoccupied with holding hearings to determine guilt and assign blame rather than getting on with examining and improving government operations. There are a lot of people around here who see themselves as big game hunters, if I can quote a famous prime minister. From what I see, these big game hunters make one big mistake: they look at rabbit droppings as their clues. At the end of the day, they really don't seem to get any results.