That's an ideal, isn't it?
What I was going to say on this--I'll get back to the responsibilities thing in a minute because these tie in--is that the Lambert commission in 1979 found that the role of the Treasury Board was the weak one in financial control. The Auditor General was fine. They weren't terribly impressed with deputy ministers, but really the Treasury Board did not do its job. The Gomery commission repeated this in both reports, that it felt the Treasury Board did not consider oversight of departmental financial administration as a major activity and didn't do it very well.
My suggestion is that the Treasury Board should do better and that the public accounts committee should ensure that the Treasury Board does better. And this doesn't have to be an adversarial relationship, because in theory, Mr. Williams, the interest is the same, and that is that good financial management and government--or it should be. Again, I'm getting to the conditional there.
But getting on to the responsibilities and accountabilities for which deputy ministers are accountable, the list in the Federal Accountability Act isn't a bad one. It includes measures to take to organize the resources of the department to deliver departmental programs in compliance with government policies and regulations--and that's compliance in the broad sense of following the statutes, the laws, the regulations, other documents.
It includes measures taken to maintain effective systems of internal control in the department. That's a key one.
It includes signing of the accounts. They're required to be kept for the preparation of the public accounts. In signing the accounts, the accounting officer is expressing a personal responsibility for the actions recorded in the accounts, and as I said earlier, non-recorded as well, which gets back to the problem we've had with the firearms thing.
And there's the performance of other specific duties, etc.
Putting those in a nutshell, they boil down to two things, really. One is what I call regularity. That's following the rules, the regulations, and the statutes. That's the compliance side. The other one is propriety, which is doing things in a proper way. Rather than propose rules and regulations, the Gomery commission--and I'm fully in support of what Justice Gomery recommended here--said that ultimately propriety boils down to an accounting officer asking herself or himself two questions when faced with a difficult decision. One is, could I satisfactorily defend this decision before the public accounts committee? And the second one is, since the public accounts committee is there on behalf of Parliament and the people of Canada, could I satisfactorily defend this decision in a public forum?
I should add that Justice Gomery, in putting those in his report, was borrowing from a British treasury document that instructs accounting officers that this is what “propriety” means.
Ultimately, what the committee and the Treasury Board should work together on is building a sense of responsibility and accountability in deputy ministers and their accounting officers, and then having that permeate the department from the top down in a way that I think--in a very distressing way--we've found hasn't happened lately; the administration too often has not met standards.