I'm now going to invite to the table Dr. Ned Franks, and we're going to talk about the protocol that this committee has been working on for the last four or five months.
Just by way of background, colleagues, there has been a development recently that I find a little disconcerting. Dr. Franks can speak to it better than I can, but when we started this, we attempted to develop a joint protocol for working with Treasury Board Secretariat, because we have very similar roles. Over the last two or three months, we've attempted to get some dialogue going with Treasury Board Secretariat. You people were all here when I questioned Mr. Wouters on this issue and just pleaded with him to talk to us.
We did finally get a response last week that Mr. Wouters is not interested in pursuing the joint protocol at all. In fact, what they've done is post on their website their own protocol—this would be the protocol from the executive—as to the appearance of accounting officers before them.
Their protocol actually deals with all committees, not only this committee. In my humble consideration, it falls far short of my understanding of the provisions of the Federal Accountability Act. The issue is not personal to the accountability issues involving previous accounting officers. In this case, as you know, in most of the instances this committee deals with, we're talking about the previous accounting officer, because of the way they switch deputies in Ottawa.
Colleagues, we're down to a classic fight between the executive arm of government and Parliament. In my view, it's up to us, as a committee of Parliament, to develop our own protocol. However, we have to be very careful that we do not have in our protocol anything that's contrary to the law, anything that's contrary to the Financial Administration Act—or any other law, for that matter—so we've had the staff working very carefully over the last number of weeks.
Dr. Franks can comment much better and with much more wisdom on the executive protocol, and he can comment on his own protocol, for which I want to thank him very much for putting so much time and effort and energy into doing. That has been circulated to members.
Without having to say anything further, I turn the floor over to Dr. Franks, and I want to thank him for being here today.