Thank you.
Just with respect to that, I'll take a little bit of the chair's prerogative here and say that one of the issues around having a meeting like this one is that in our offices all of a sudden we've been getting letters from people in the public service. This one was sent to me in advance of Mr. Wernick's appearance at PACP today: “I want to send you some thoughts on the culture of the public service that could have led to this Phoenix disaster.”
He says he worked at such-and-such a ministry and had been there for quite a few years. I won't give you the years or where he works.
He continues, “I had the pleasure of serving as an advisor to the deputy minister for one of those years. In my time in that office, I was profoundly disappointed to see how priorities were set—in short, the only concern to be satisfying the mandate letter commitments of the minister.”
He goes on and lists other things: “Having seen this up close and personal, I was entirely unsurprised by everything I read in the Auditor General's report. If MPs really want to tackle the broken culture of the public service, they could begin by demanding those responsible for the Phoenix mess to be held to account. As it stands, no one is ever held responsible for the screw-ups. People are simply shuffled into different positions.”
There is part of the culture. I think the Auditor General also mentioned that some of these deputy ministers are here for a year or two and then shuffled off to another department. I think that's part of what he says is the problem.
The Auditor General says, “In this culture, for a public servant, it is often better to do nothing than to do something that doesn't work out.”
The fear of risk: is that part of the culture? We're getting letters from public servants saying that this culture needs to be fixed.
Lisa...or Ms. Raitt; I'm sorry.