In many ways, the performance audit methodology the Auditor General of Canada uses and which is used in many other countries in the world is a little bit hard to understand, in the sense that they say they're not looking at performance, but they do come awfully close to doing so. Certainly, committees of Parliament are not so constrained, and many such studies in the past—I haven't looked at the agenda of committees in the current Parliament—were under way. They would invite officials, and they would come through the minister's office. There are certain procedures for it, but in the past that seemed to work. Certainly, the clients of the program would be invited to be witnesses on these studies, and in addition, academics or others who have just studied the program would be invited.
To jump into a different thought—it's related, but it's a little bit different—in some cases in the past when the government wanted to make a policy change, it deliberately asked the committee to do a study of that. One of the reasons they did that was because the whole idea of parliamentary government is that the people consent. It's about building consensus, about people feeling that what the government is doing, they don't have to rebel against it. They have confidence that the process is fair. That doesn't mean they're going to agree with everything, but there is consent. By having a parliamentary committee, especially with all-party agreement, come up with a recommendation, in many cases it's the easiest way for a government to implement a change that everybody realizes is needed, but there will be powerful forces against it. So I think doing it in consultation with people is just an essential thing to do for programs, but it doesn't mean it's this committee; it means all of the committees with departmental responsibilities.
As I said, I don't know how many of those studies are under way, but that was in the 2001 period when we did the study, and there were 19 studies over the period of one year of those kinds of matters. All of them looked at resources and results. Many of them looked at the outside—at public need as related to the results the government was achieving. So there's a long history of doing that and having committees doing it. In some cases, the government might not be happy with it, but in many cases the government is happy with it because it helps them get the job done that they want done.