Let me just comment on the first two points.
The Senate does very useful work and I'm not one of those who say that the Senate is a completely useless institution. Most of its good work happens in committees, and in a book edited by Senator Joyal I make a case for the role that committees play in providing scrutiny of ongoing policies and programs. I think the Senate is a bit of an anachronism, being unelected, but the Senate is there. We pay for the Senate. We might as well get some value out of it. A body like the Senate national finance committee does good work. That's why I included them. It's hard, even in a House that's growing to 330 members, to find enough MPs interested in the dull, grinding work of understanding government finances to create a mega-super-committee with MPs alone.
As to the movement of MPs, you're right. We have to respect democracy, and we have a very high turnover, one of the highest of all western legislatures. About 45%, I think, are freshmen MPs after each election. So we lose a number of members who are building up experience, but the MPs add to that problem by moving around committees. At least, they used to do that a lot.
On the role of officers of Parliament, agents of Parliament, I think the document you're quoting from was actually a speech. I was entitled to be theatrical and be provocative, and that was my intention. But the PBO is there. I think if there is going to be a parliamentary budget officer, you have to find the right balance between giving him independence and giving him accountability, and you have to make him serve the committee rather than have the committee serve him. Sometimes rollovers will happen in the public accounts committee where the Auditor General, just by the force of his or her expertise and the depth of his or her capacity, can lead the committee down certain paths, and the committee doesn't do as much as it might to set its own agenda.
So I think the PBO needs to be put at the disposal of members of Parliament, and that's why I suggested it needs a place where it can come and answer for its budget on an annual basis. These people can develop into superheroes in their own minds. They get to point out the problems in government, and given a government the size of the Government of Canada, there will always be problems. So from the sidelines they can self-righteously criticize people in government for things that go wrong. But I think they have to answer for the judgments they make and do that in front of the elected representatives.
So I'm not entirely cynical. There was another committee on the past, present, and future of officers of Parliament where I set forth five structural conditions meant to ensure the right balance between independence and accountability.