I'll just make a few opening comments or observations on witnesses. This is the committee where, in some instances, the witnesses should be feeling pain when they come here and a lot more pain after they leave. This is not the forum for compassionate conservatism or anything else; it's an area for compassion.
I'm going to make a couple of observations contrasting the private sector with the way government delivers things. I'm sorry if this illustrates a bias, but the systems approach and the total quality management approach in the delivery of programs and services in the private sector is to get into continuous improvement, with active managers who find problems at the onset, find the root cause, and fix the problems so that they don't repeat themselves. With government, we deliver programs and services, and the train wrecks come here. It's an end inspection system.
Most of those people who are in TQM do not believe in end inspection systems. Their systems are so strong that they're not even concerned about failures at the end of the system, and the data generally proves them true. We have an end inspection system here. We deal with failures in the delivery of programs and services. We beat up on witnesses, and so on.
What I generally find is that the bureaucrats will let these things go on forever and a day unless they're discovered. And there is a bias on it. Quite literally, we're trying to do some things with government that I'm not exactly sure government can always do. For bureaucrats, if they're given the gun registry program or something and it's failing and not working, the solution is that if you just give us more manpower or more resources, more computer programs, and spend more money on it, we'll eventually get this thing fixed. I actually think there are elected politicians who figure that if you spent enough money on it, you could get pigs to fly. But there is a limit to what government can do.
I'm biased on that point. We should know what government can do and make it do a good job, but a lot of it should be evaluated to the limits of what government can be doing too, because quite often this is what's happening on these committees. I'd cite the Indian Affairs reports that have come out of this committee over and over again. The same failures are happening over and over again. It's a failure of government.
I'm not exactly sure in my own mind that the solutions we're always proposing are adopted. I'm not sure whether the solutions always get to the root cause of the problem and get the problem fixed either. It's easy, always, to say that the solution is to hire more bureaucrats and spend more money and get more resources there. The private sector people would really dispute that.
So it's our approach to dealing with things. But those are just some observations I'd have on this thing.
The Indian Affairs one really bothers me. I think some things have come back here two or three times, and I'm not exactly sure we've made one iota of progress on them. We have some high-priced people in the bureaucracy who are supposed to be making sure that these things aren't happening and that people are getting first-class service and we're getting to the root of the problems. It's rather frustrating, I think, for anybody who's on here.
I certainly don't know, Geoff, where you're coming from with making witnesses feel more comfortable in this committee, because it's not a committee that I would feel very happy about, with some of these instances, if the people responsible for these programs slept when they got home at night after being here, because they don't deserve to sleep well.
Those are some of my comments, for what they're worth. I wish we had more things in the government that were proactive. I scratch my head as to what the Comptroller General is here for. It seems to me the Comptroller General should be preventing these train wrecks from happening in the first place so that the Auditor General doesn't have reports to give us and we don't have to have these meetings. But those are a few comments I'm just getting off my chest on this matter.