Fair enough. But through a report, this committee has come to the conclusion that she must accept responsibility. I think that was a wise conclusion.
On the subject of the degree to which financial controls ought to be centralized, this debate has been ongoing in Canada for the past 70 or 80 years, back to the early 1930s. When the Depression was hitting, the controls were so loose that R.B. Bennett actually appointed himself the finance minister and the Treasury Board president, and for all practical intents and purposes made himself a comptroller general, because he felt things were so out of hand.
Then over time things were decentralized. There was the Glassco commission in the 1960s that led to the position of comptroller general being eliminated from Treasury Board altogether, which left the responsibility to the departments to manage. Then in the mid-1970s the control had become so dispersed, as I have here in the report our researchers prepared for us, “that Parliament—and indeed Government—has lost, or is close to losing, effective control of the public purse”. That was what your office said in 1976.
In 2003, the last government—to its credit, I think—increased the control of Treasury Board and the Treasury Board Secretariat to manage and control spending. Yes, we'll give credit where credit is due; that's fair. So now it seems we're moving back in these years to more centralized financial management
But with the accountability act, we're also making the deputy heads accounting officers who are going to be responsible for this committee. As I see it, this is the first time we've done both: responsibility for the deputy head and responsibility for the central agency.
I want your opinion on how this can be adequately married, because it seems throughout our history, going back those 70 years, it's never really been done particularly well.