Mr. Chairman, this is an issue that I've always considered to be very serious. In fact, I would call it a very significant weakness in government management, at least at the federal level. The turnover of deputy ministers is much too quick. Not only is it quick, but most of the time it's not planned.
So the succession from one deputy minister to the other is not something that's been well done, and it's difficult to imagine how these huge organizations can do this without paying a certain price for that. There are always difficult files on which deputy ministers are working. There are issues that take some time to grasp as well. So changing leadership so frequently, in my view, is not conducive to the good management on the organization, nor is it conducive to good accountability, because people aren't in there long enough to be held accountable for very much.
If you add to that another factor, which is the certain natural turnover of ministers themselves because of elections and so on, the amount of time during which a minister and a deputy are together is relatively short. So to me, it's a major problem, and I think the federal government has to find ways to do better than that. The recommendation you're referring to--deputy ministers for a minimum of three years, barring some unforeseen events--to me makes a lot of sense. I think three years in itself is not very long.
As you may know, since I left the position of Auditor General, I've been involved in the private sector on the boards of some public companies, and the issue of succession planning for the heads of companies is something to which boards devote a lot of attention and a lot of effort. When you compare that to the situation in the federal government, where things happen instantly and sometimes quite often deputy ministers cross in the middle of the night, it's a very different world. I think it reduces the effectiveness of the federal government substantially.