Thank you, Mr. Smith.
Thanks to all of you.
I want to make a couple of comments. As we're probably aware by now, after doing the reading we've done, the issue is complicated. It's complex. There have been many articles written—and Mr. Smith referred to some of them—and presentations given on the whole issue of performance reports.
Of course, the overall goal is to align results with inputs, or in other words, that the department whose performance is being reported is achieving the results. One of the major problems that has been seen over the years is that there aren't really any predetermined results or objectives.
As Mr. Maxwell has indicated, in a political environment, why would I give you a stick to beat me over the head with? And that's probably the reason we don't have that here.
It has been ongoing. A lot of the articles talk about the reports being complex. This is not my own opinion; these are articles written by CCAF and others. They talk about the reports being complex and hard to read. They say they're not consistent from year to year and describe activities and processes rather than results.
As Mr. Maxwell said, they're not balanced. They do not describe the risks or the problems facing the departments. The Auditor General has done a number of audits--at least three, if not four, with the last one in 2005--and all of them have been relatively negative.
I refer the members to the excellent articles written by CCAF. One of the statements coming from the articles—and this is really the test—is that expected users would be parliamentarians, media, and the public, while the empirical evidence that has been done after extensive research shows that there are very few people who actually use these reports.
In my view, parliamentarians share a lot of the blame for that, because they don't spend a lot of time on the performance reports. It's not something for which we, as parliamentarians, can blame others. We should accept some of the blame ourselves.
That is some of the background to this meeting. I think it will be a good meeting. I'm going to start the order, and at around twenty-five minutes after nine I'm going to call in the new slate of witnesses, and we'll continue the order so everyone will get a chance to speak.
That said, we're going to start the first round.
Monsieur Dion, vous avez sept minutes.