As I mentioned in my opening statement, I think there are special issues, if you will, or special concerns around many of the small agencies that perform quasi-judicial, ombudsman-type roles. In order to do that, they require independence from central agency direction of their mandate, but they still have to give appropriate accountability for their use of financial and human resources.
We have seen, unfortunately, a couple of instances where the central agencies have been hesitant to be seen to be interfering—and I suspect it would be the same thing with the Solicitor General with an ombudsman kind of person, in that the department would be hesitant to become too intrusive into management.
So we are starting what will probably be a couple of audits on the whole question of the governance of small agencies. First of all, how many are there? What kinds of roles do they fulfill, because there is a myriad of them? How do they maintain that professional independence while having proper accountability? There are a number of issues that will come up from those. We would hope to have a broad overview piece by late 2008, probably, and then have some specific audit issues that we can bring to the committee.