Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, Professor Good, for speaking with us today.
I want to talk about your recommendations. There have been other witnesses before this committee who have had some similar recommendations, and we could quibble about some of them.
The one I want to focus on is your last one about committees needing to develop more of a strategy for reviewing the budgets and the estimates. We had one witness here, John Williams in particular, who talked about the challenge of trying to be broad and shallow when it comes to looking at all of the estimates, versus going narrow and deep. Broad and shallow would be a high-level look at macro estimates, versus taking one or two departments and doing more of a dive and getting into things like departmental performance reports and reports on planning and priorities. I think you alluded to that.
I think it would be useful for parliamentarians to actually spend some time looking at the DPRs and the RPPs. I don't think many parliamentarians actually look at them, ever. They are available. They are all online. The public can help themselves. Parliamentarians can help themselves, but they tend not to. Unless you put a structure around it for parliamentarians to do a deeper investigation, you won't get some of those important questions coming out.
I want to get some further feedback from you. There are two scenarios that come up in my mind when it comes to wanting to compel parliamentarians to spend some time with the RPPs and the DPRs.
I suppose one scenario is that the government operations committee could be the committee appointed to spend the time looking at those things on a selective basis. With 87 departments and agencies, we can't do all of them in a given year, but we can certainly dive into some of them. I suppose another approach is to compel other committees, not just the government operations committee, to spend some time looking at the DPRs and RPPs—for example, the aboriginal and northern development committee looking at the DPRs and RPPs for that department.
Could you expand on your recommendation? How do you think that could actually work in a parliamentary process when it comes to reviewing those kinds of reports?