Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I appreciate the complexity of audits, because I've actually worked not as an auditor, but with audits, in the sense that I have had audits done for me. I appreciate what Mr. Ralston is trying to suggest.
Clearly, those of us who are here are trying to assure the folks we've come here to represent--that is, the Canadian public--that when we collect their dollars, when we tell them those have been spent wisely on their priorities, we indeed can somehow point to something that actually says this is true. Otherwise, it just becomes another politician telling the general public that they've collected their money and saying, “Trust me, it's okay”. You can rank us on a scale of trustworthy people and you'll find me somewhere not close to a firefighter.
The difficulty becomes that internal audits are somewhat magical for departments to look at, but not necessarily for us, in the sense of how we are going to then try to get through them. Because occasionally what we need to have is what the Auditor General does, which is to give us a larger picture. She does that now. But ultimately, it's too big, to be honest, in the sense that it's a macro piece when we don't necessarily want to talk to you line by line. I've done that as a municipal councillor. We're not interested in that in the sense of wanting to do that every time, but indeed we need to start looking at a more specific piece.
We've talked about departmental pieces, which aren't necessarily so small, especially when we're talking about $22 billion in the Department of National Defence and some other areas that are large, such as the human resource development and skills training department. They're big departments with large amounts of money. They affect literally hundreds of thousands of people across this country. It seems to me that in our way of having to report, we need some assistance.
I hear your position. I guess my question to you is how you intend to make sure that I as a parliamentarian--not an auditor, not an accountant--can understand what you're trying to tell me with that audit, so that I can communicate that to the folks I represent who are asking me those questions.