My understanding is that one of the roles of this committee is to also analyze across departments—in other words, where there is a substantive area that the government is delivering programs on, but they are being delivered through a number of departments and agencies.
In my previous role as the Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development critic, we ran into this, even when we had the minister and the deputy ADMs in the committee to look at the main estimates. It was simply revealed to us at that point, “Well, you can't ask that because that's actually for the Minister of Health. Gee, too bad she's not here.”
So it would be a far more useful exercise—and probably less frustrating for the officials and the ministers themselves—if a lot of that information could simply be available online. Then the process of estimates could be on the broader policies of what direction we are going in, and so forth.
I think there would be a lot of advantages to simply providing that information more openly and transparently. I think you sort of alluded to the issue that until that information is provided you can keep it as a hot issue. The hot issue is the government's secret. In fact, if the information were readily available, you could move on to bigger issues of Parliament. So I think you are raising some really interesting issues here.