You know, in my life experience, communication between people who have power makes a lot of sense. I think common sense would tell you that. There are things that were in the guidelines that I personally didn't agree with. The Treasury Board guidelines suggested this committee should be well behaved when we're dealing with accounting officers before us. Well, everybody on this committee knows you don't get before this committee without having stepped out of line somehow, and you're going to hear about it on this committee.
To me, there are things on both sides that I think would make the meeting constructive. We say it's an ongoing process. If our committee is going to be opposed to having the people who have power getting together to discuss things, how in the world are you ever going to get anything resolved? It seems to me it's a strange argument to say we do not want to meet with the President of the Treasury Board because maybe they might just resolve some of these differences. Some of the points, quite honestly, I think are words, and we're talking about how many angels are dancing at the end of a pin.
I think there could be a lot of merit in these two individuals getting together, and we could all save ourselves a lot of hot air in this committee. But if you don't want communications with government, so be it. You may have what Mr. Christopherson didn't want--a clash between what Treasury Board is telling their people and what we understand it to be here. I think that would be unfortunate.
So I think common sense should dictate that we should try to take that extra step to have the ongoing process in place to improve the guidelines we're using here.