I think the mandate of the PBO should be largely in support of committees on supply. If you're studying whether the age of qualification for the OAS should be reduced or not, you have ample access to experts out there who can come in on contract and work with your witnesses. But there is nobody out there in the private sector—there's only one former clerk alive, and that's me—who understands the supply process and the supply details. So you need a staff that is on it, and that is continuity for you and for the next committee and the one thereafter, much as you have with the library and the researchers.
I'm not saying that the PBO should not have the mandate it has now. I'm saying it hasn't exercised part of its mandate. As far as I know there has not been a lot of work done by the PBO on estimates, and it's been before them and with them from day one. I would move it out of the library. It's kind of a barnacle on the side of the library, and you remember the tussles they had at the very beginning of the creation of the office, where the poor man didn't know who he reported to and what he was supposed to do. It's not a criticism; I'm just saying it's in the wrong place. Put it in the House, in the committee's branch, and make him an officer of the House, and then that office has to conduct itself....
Right now the perception, at least on the outside, is that it is largely an opposition function. Why can't you as government have access to some of this information and direct, through your majority control, certain studies that you want done from time to time? It's not sufficient for government parliamentarians to say you have all the bureaucracy. As parliamentarians sitting in government, you can have influence on your own government, and hold it accountable for some of the things it does. It doesn't have to be negative and it doesn't have to be a confidence issue, and you shouldn't get booted out of caucus because you have a point of view on a particular aspect of spending.