As you heard in our presentation, there is a whole range of committees that intervene, whether it be Treasury Board, Privy Council, the cabinet, the departments themselves or the Department of Public Works. There is an accreditation process. The committees meet to approve campaigns. One committee will refer the matter to another committee, which then approves what the other committee approved previously and so on. That process mobilizes public servants, politicians and many other people. It ends up generating enormous costs, and we haven't even yet added the cost of auditing. In Public Works, that type of expenditure, especially in the area of advertising, is given a great deal of scrutiny. The Auditor General dedicates a lot of resources to audit a $33 million expenditure. We suspect that it costs several million dollars.
If our hypothesis that it costs 25 or $30 million, or even more, to ensure accountability in all of that is correct, then we could say that those measures are rather excessive. We therefore recommend that Treasury Board take concrete steps and grant us $500,000. We would use a simple, effective and transparent process that we would be responsible for, and that would allow us to avoid going through four committees, three agencies, and so on.
When it comes to ad campaigns, the departments get discouraged. In fact, they have to wait a year or more between the time they decide to plan that campaign and the time at which it is broadcast over the television or on radio. People must therefore decide what their department's priority will be and what programs they will want to emphasize a year later. That discourages them.