Another observation I have concerns the procurement of British submarines—a boondoggle, as it turns out—and also the sponsorship scandal, the HRDC boondoggle, the gun registry, Shawinigate, and a whole lot of other things, which through your office were exposed as the bungling of government programs, and so on.
I go to paragraph 16, where you state the importance of the management cycle. I think the importance of the cycle is that the managers of these government programs and departments should be following a management cycle, and the taxpayers should expect this at the very least from the people who are managing programs, if they have this process in place and we're getting results for our money.
In my view, the Treasury Board should make sure these programs, among many things, are being delivered in accordance with some sound management cycle.
Clearly, in the cases I've identified here, there was an absence of any management cycle. It was just politicians going ahead with some boondoggle, authorizing something, and then closing their eyes to the whole process and hoping that by random luck these things would work out—which they didn't. That's not the way things happen in the world. They happen from good management, sound planning, and so on. This was really an indictment of incompetency at the highest levels of government and management in government.
Do you see the Treasury Board's role as making sure that when we have government programs, the government is following proper management practices and a good management cycle?