Thank you, sir.
The first answer is that as I emphasized in the protocol and in my remarks today--and as the Privy Council Office does, this being one of those things we agree on--the accounting officer provisions of the Financial Administration Act give no new powers to deputy ministers. This protocol, working within the existing statutes, attempts to establish a means of holding accountable the heads of departments and heads of agencies, the accounting officers, for responsibilities that they already have and that ministers do not have. And I emphasize that; there's no point in pretending that ministers have them, because they don't, and if this is something that affects question period, then question period is going to have to get changed.
For instance, there's a perfectly straightforward answer for a minister if a decision is clearly the responsibility of the accounting officer. He can give information, and then, if the question comes up again--if it's something being investigated by, say, the public accounts committee--the minister can say, I have given an answer to this and it is now the responsibility of the public accounts committee.
An answer in Parliament has to meet two criteria. One, it has to be in parliamentary language, and two, it has to be relevant to the question. No answer meets those criteria, and that has been used in the past very effectively by ministers when they were not responsible for an issue. There are many ways of handling that problem.
On the second problem, to use the omelette analogy again, can you disentangle the whites from the yolks in the mixture of functions of minister and deputy minister? The answer is yes. I was talking to one lawyer about what we were doing here, and his response was that it's not really an omelette, it's a soft-boiled egg; it's gooey, but you can still distinguish the white from the yolk.
To go back in history, the British Parliament in 1862 established a public accounts committee. In 1865 the comptroller and auditor general act was passed. By 1867 the British public accounts committee was wrestling with the question of who it should hold accountable, the ministers or the permanent heads, that being the deputy ministers. It decided to hold the deputy ministers accountable, not the ministers. Britain has followed that path since then.
All I'm saying is let's carry that one step further. The British North America Act--the Constitution Act, 1867, as it's now called--says that Canada shall have a constitution like the British. The British Constitution in 1867 contained in it the possibility, and the beginning of the reality, of a division of powers between ministers and accounting officers. So it's perfectly legitimate, within our Constitution, to create something that was already existing in the British Constitution in 1867. Simply because it's taken us 140 years longer than the Brits to get there doesn't mean it isn't something worth doing. And the provisions of the accounting act are an effort to do it.
I have very little sympathy with the complaint or the feeling that this is a problem because this is only one side. I was the person who produced the protocol, and I consulted with a great many people. The ones I wanted to consult with, the government, refused to consult. Even when the last invitation was offered, after my last attendance before the committee in February, the government did not make any effort to consult. It simply produced its own document. I don't consider that a serious, honest effort on their part to cooperate with the committee.