On the first question of a commissioner, when I appeared before the committee I indicated that this was a policy decision, and should Parliament wish to create a commissioner, that was not for us to comment on. But from this audit, I think we show that a lot can be done without necessarily creating a commissioner.
Status of Women has done a lot of training on this, and I think our recommendations point to that. They need much more support from the central agencies--notably Privy Council Office and the Treasury Board Secretariat--to ensure that the analyses are done.
In all honesty, a commissioner would probably say they were not doing the analyses, so you would have to go back to the central agencies that have a bit of clout in the system to make that occur. There are departments that have many of the elements one would expect in a framework; they just have to be extended further.
On the question of the checklist, we were aware of it. The difficulty we have is that many of the documents and analyses.... As I mentioned in the beginning, we were told that the challenge function we would expect to see was not documented in a form that could be made available to us. Many of the budget documents are of a type of cabinet confidence that is also not available to us. They included the analysis with the recommendations to the minister, and we do not see recommendations to ministers, nor do we want to see them.
That could only be resolved by having a different structure of documents with the analysis completely separate. I don't think Finance is going to do that for us, quite frankly.