I appreciate your comments, and I very much agree with you that the Treasury Board's job is not to micromanage government departments. My goodness, there should be enough professionalism in the departments so that they can manage themselves, subject to supervision and accountability by Treasury Board.
This is where things have gone right off the rails. If we govern by principles only, it's hard sometimes when things go off the rails to realize that they are going off the rails and to get them back. This is where it's a bit of a conundrum.
There are a couple of points I wanted to discuss with you. First, a year or so ago, the government decided that chief financial officers should be professional accountants. What a surprise. These people are handling billions of dollars—$200 billion in total—and there are about 20 or 25 CFOs. Now we say that perhaps they should be professional accountants. Wow! Why haven't they been professional accountants for 40 or 50 years? I don't know.
On the same line, we just dealt with an issue regarding the estimates and the gun registry, where there was a big debate here at the public accounts committee—I think there was about $21 million or $23 million—about whether it had to be reported in the supplementary estimates or whether it could be allowed to slide to another time. It just happened to be a politically hot and difficult time for the government of the day. They had a simple little legal opinion that said, you can't avoid it; you have to seek permission, seek authorization, and seek the estimates. They didn't like that, so they got a long, convoluted, contorted, difficult, impossible to read, and impossible to agree with legal opinion that finally said, oh yes, you can do this.
The Comptroller General of Canada was trumped. Now this is a senior accountant for the Government of Canada, a professional accountant, who was trumped by a legal opinion by a contract lawyer, as to what the accounting procedure should be.
Here we have this conundrum. We're trying to say we're governed by rules, but when the rules don't apply, people.... We found out it was Ms. Bloodworth, I believe, who took the responsibility for that decision, and she is a deputy minister. She said, hey, I decided we needed a different legal opinion.
So principles are fine, but you shouldn't use micromanagement by the Treasury Board. When deputies comes up against something they don't like, they find a way around it. Let's square the circle, or whatever the phrase actually is.