Mr. Chairman, I want to make a few points regarding what was raised earlier, primarily for the Treasury Board.
I go back to the time prior to the millennium when we all thought that all the computers were going to fail. This committee told the Treasury Board to become hands-on, take direction, and hold departments accountable for their progress or lack thereof because of the impending meltdown.
Fortunately, it didn't happen, thank goodness, because the Treasury Board said it was not their job to police their own rules. They would float them out there, say do this and do that and take the appropriate action, but they had no discipline to enforce what they were saying. The DMs in the departments were little fiefdoms that had too much power on their own. And the Treasury Board ended up slapping them around with a wet noodle and not getting very much done.
On that basis, when you talk about the Treasury Board responding to reports and not the Auditor General, I'm a little concerned that Treasury Board would be more inclined to say that all is well. We saw from their complicit involvement in the firearms situation--Jim Judd was the secretary of the Treasury Board at the time--that they are not there to uphold the central, core values of administration; they are there to get the job done, Mr. Chair.
I like the idea that the Treasury Board perhaps enunciate and elaborate on the accountability of DMs before this committee. But I'd like to see that decision in a recommendation approved by this particular committee, because the new Federal Accountability Act says that the DMs are accountable before Parliament, and surely that's up to us to determine, not up to the Treasury Board. I recall Professor Franks' comments about the Treasury Board publications tabled at this committee last fall, and they were none to kind, if you may recall, Mr. Chair. That was on the doctrine of accountability and ministerial accountability and so on. Therefore, I wouldn't want to delegate this to the Treasury Board.
I think, Mr. Chair, that out of this discussion we are having today, we should think about a report on things like that.
The other point I want to bring up is this. I don't want Mr. Sauvageau to think I was dismissing his concern, because it's a valid concern, and I really didn't have an answer for him, because Parliament is not an institution of management. Parliament is an institution of accountability. And we have to get that clear in our minds. We are not part of the management structure of government. Therefore, if we see something going off the rails, we jump in and make it right.
Because timeliness is important to ensure credibility if the issue becomes public--the issue he was talking about, which was the aquatic centre in Montreal--I thought the Auditor General should write to the Comptroller General and seek his assurance that all is well. This puts the Comptroller General, the chief accountant for the Government of Canada, on the hook for assuring the Auditor General that he has the tools and mechanisms to just jump right in and ask if this is being managed appropriately. And his report can be tabled here.