Thank you very much for the question; much appreciated.
On the issue of capacity and lack of research support, we just unveiled the strategy a couple of months ago. We haven't started working yet with the legislatures that are in that position. But perhaps our main strategy would be to help the legislature or the government and the auditor general in that particular jurisdiction to raise awareness about the importance of the public accounts committee.
One of the problems we're trying to make clear to jurisdictions when we go there is that the public accounts committee is not, in our view, just another committee. I was going to say not just another legislative committee, but in fact it's not a legislative committee, it's an oversight committee. It has special needs because of the fact that an auditor general, in order to take action on findings, requires a public accounts committee to issue recommendations. Because of that, I think one of the messages we have to try to get out in those jurisdictions is that public accounts committees are not the same as other parliamentary or legislative committees, and they therefore sometimes need more resources in order to be able to do their jobs.
You also asked--if I understood your question correctly--how we get members to want to be on the public accounts committee. There was an allusion to that issue, I remember, when Jonathan Malloy said that the public accounts committee was not always seen as one of the “sexy” committees.
If we go back to the draft strategy, that's really why we've added that fifth pillar. As Mr. Chairman will recall, we talked about this in Charlottetown. One of the issues that comes up is that it's much easier for a member on a legislative committee--the transport committee, say--to tell their constituents about the law passed on the building of the Trans-Canada Highway and the crucial amendment they made. It's easier to make a connection with constituents so that they understand that. To my understanding, it's much more difficult for a public accounts committee member to do that given the very technical nature of some of the issues they're looking at and the fact that those issues are changing all the time.
So when we talk about incentives, that really is one of them. Perhaps helping legislators communicate their value added to the public would increase their incentive to want to be on this committee and to be involved.