Thank you.
As I say, what I was trying to do was to start the conversation, and I think I did that. I appreciate that the committee is picking up on that. I was also quite frankly happy with what the deputy minister of Public Services and Procurement Canada said when it came to her conversation about needing to change the culture within her department, and the need to allow people within her department to speak frankly. I think we've already heard both of the people who were here, the secretary and the deputy minister, talking about the need to make some changes to culture. The secretary talked about the need to make sure that Treasury Board policies are implemented in substance, not just in form, which I think is right.
One thing we need to consider in our work as well is that maybe we have been too easy on the Treasury Board Secretariat in some of our audits. We have accepted the Treasury Board Secretariat's role as a sort of policy-maker, and I think maybe we need to be much more insistent that they also have a responsibility to make sure that their policies are being implemented the right way. That doesn't mean they have to be holding departments' hands all the time, but they should have some way of knowing whether the policies are being accepted and implemented the right way.
The last thing I will mention was passed to me just before the hearing. I don't know if you would want to do this, and I wasn't aware of it before now. The public administration and constitutional affairs committee in the U.K. House of Commons has just put out a report called “The Minister and the Official: The Fulcrum of Whitehall Effectiveness”. There's a parliamentary committee in a Westminster culture like ours that in fact has studied this very question about how ministers interact with officials. Again, I don't know whether you want to do that type of a study, but at least looking at that report might give you some ideas.