The reason I pursued it a bit is that if you recall--and correct me if I'm wrong, because I'm just going by memory--it seemed to me that most of the focus of the Treasury Board was really over the deputy. That is often a good litmus test of the department, but it is still separate. You can still have a strong, healthy department in which the DM is the problem, and if they don't deal with that, you're going to get into a problem with the whole department.
Maybe that's an area we ought to be delving into--making sure that when they're doing all this work around DMs, we have some ability to identify clearly who has that oversight. If it's not Treasury Board, then it's PCO or whoever, but who is expected to be the canary in the mine shaft saying we have organizational problems and raising the red flags and having that brought to the attention of people who are decision-makers and can do something about it? That may be one of the areas in which we may need a little more detail, and I thank you very much for that.
Further to questions other colleagues were asking earlier about the deputies, the other problem we had, aside from deputies coming in and saying “It's not my job”, and then the minister coming in and saying “Well, it's not my job”, and we couldn't get an answer from either one of them--hopefully that's going to be cured with the accounting officer designation--is that deputies move so quickly that when you call them in and ask them who's accountable--not why the problem happened, but who is accountable--their honest answer is, “I don't know; I wasn't there.” At that moment this committee is completely denied the opportunity to ask what their thinking was or what problems were not identified in their formal reports; we can't do it.
One of the answers we got from Treasury Board--and it was a good point--was that you can still do it when you have an inquiry. As we saw with Gomery, other DMs were brought back. That's pretty extreme if all you want to do is find out from a DM what he or she was thinking.
Do you see something we haven't yet done or something we're doing or something in the new bill that you think is going to help answer that? It's not necessarily to go after the DM per se. They're not always going to be the problem, but without somebody taking responsibility for having been there at the time the decision was taken, we're denied the opportunity to get behind that, other than through the factual minuted record, which is basically all the current DM offers up.
Yes or no?