I do. I feel that whatever organization gets created needs to have a really strong public interest mandate. If it were private, particularly if there were a for-profit model, I would worry that the public interest mandate would be compromised.
The committee might look at the example of the Canadian Council on Social Development, which I believe in the late eighties or early nineties, as a non-profit, actually did a function of data analysis on socio-economic issues. From what I understand, it was considered quite credible. It was given a federal contract to do that. It no longer performs that function, but it is a model of a completely independent agency that did analysis and was trusted in that analysis in terms of doing it transparently and being seen as credible by a broad range of stakeholders.
I think it is possible, but again, I would emphasize that for the sake of public trust I think we really need independence, and that includes independence from policy and regulatory functions, but also independence from industry. We don't want particular sectors of industry to seem to have more influence on the data. Especially in our current context, where our energy systems are changing really quickly, we want to make sure that it's independent of any particular industry or any particular side of industry.