As I indicated in my first introductory remarks, I had a call from someone in the office of the President of the Treasury Board, who was Mr. John Baird at the time. He had newly been.... Everybody was sort of new at that time. I responded by going up to Ottawa. I had a very cordial meeting with him, and he had several people on his staff present at that meeting. I don't know to what extent I can describe that meeting, except that, as I said, he indicated that his task, the task that had been assigned to him by the Prime Minister, had been to see to the enactment of the Federal Accountability Act.
Now, I had not even seen a draft of that legislation at that time, so I didn't know what was in it. It was clearly legislation that had been drafted before they received my report. When people say that the Federal Accountability Act is a response to my report, that's incorrect. The Federal Accountability Act was drafted and the decisions as to what it would contain were made long before my report was produced.
Some of the provisions in that legislation were clearly inspired, I think, by some of the revelations that occurred during the commission's hearings and some of them anticipated a few of my recommendations. But because you call a piece of legislation an accountability act doesn't mean, in my view, that it is necessarily the right way to re-establish accountability.
I called my second report “Restoring Accountability”; that is my recipe for how you restore accountability, and it doesn't necessarily correspond to the Federal Accountability Act.
I think the Federal Accountability Act is a fine piece of legislation, which deals in a very positive way with many problems. It's just that I don't think it deals with the main problem.