Thank you very much.
Mr. Chairman, as a visitor to this committee, I want to say it's very gratifying to see the tremendous interest you have in the audience here today. If they stay for the next meeting, they may find it almost as interesting as this one, so I hope they will stick around.
Mr. Tilson said he wasn't being critical. I think that was an understatement, if you'll forgive me. I want to urge my colleagues opposite to assist their ministers, not by throwing lob balls and easy questions, but by holding the departments to account.
Having been a minister, I appreciated the work of committees when they uncovered things I didn't know about, when they provided ideas that were useful, and when they held us to account. That's a very useful role for members on all sides of the committee.
What's disturbing about a response you gave earlier, Mr. Ball, was that you looked to the chairman to confirm it was true that the role of the agency in responding to a report from a committee is simply to say, here's what we're currently doing. It seem to me that the work of a committee ought to be as a catalyst. The work of parliamentarians in this regard--listening to witnesses, providing analysis, and providing arguments--ought to be as a catalyst for an agency or a department, to look into what it's doing to look for better ways of doing things.
In this regard, let me turn to recommendation 12, which called upon the agency to “work to facilitate, in collaboration with the Joint Consortium for School Health, appropriate healthy food and physical activity standards and programs in schools”.
This is a consortium that works with deputy ministers. I'd like to know what's happening with it. The answer simply refers to “working collaboratively with the World Health Organization to develop an international school policy framework”, etc. It doesn't really give any answer to suggest there's any effort going into this work across federal-provincial governments.
I'd like to know when the last meeting of this consortium was and what it's doing.