Very good. Thank you, Chair. I appreciate the opportunity to continue.
I want to stay on the data issue. I only have a couple of brief moments. I have to say, and I would say to my colleagues, that I see a unique opportunity here for us in a way that hasn't been as obvious, at least in my memory, for a long time, having served on this committee now for 12 years, and that is to show the synergy of two entities working together.
There's the Auditor General and the work that they do and there's the public accounts committee, but many times even politically we don't make the connection that the two are part of an overall system. In my experience, for emerging democracies the first step in getting democracy is to have relatively free and fair elections that allow the political will of the people to be expressed. That's step one, which is why so many of us go to Ukraine to try to help them get to that first step in having that kind of representative government.
Almost the immediate second step, if you take a look at the creation of our country, was that one of the first things that happened after we got the major pieces of Confederation in place was that the Office of the Auditor General was created, and within a couple of years there was this committee.
They're often seen as two entities, but they're the same thing and they work together. That's why, and I'll be brief, the IMF and the World Bank, even in terms of Ukraine and the money they want to invest there, were sending out a message to the world saying, “Look, we're ready to invest billions in there, but frankly they haven't got the systems in place to guarantee the money won't be stolen before it ever gets to the public treasury.“
What they wanted to do, and the call that went out, was to help get... The World Bank and the WTO—get this—were looking to Ukraine to strengthen their auditor general public accounts system.
I take that big macro picture and bring it down to the micro, in that we now have an opportunity for the balance of this Parliament to take the advice of the Auditor General, who has not only underscored this issue, but is pleased, in his opinion, with the fact that we have picked up this torch and are running with it. We appreciate his looking at this in that macro sense.
For the rest of this Parliament, Chair, could I suggest we ask our analysts to prepare for our consideration that when we're doing report writing we take into account all that we've said here. Remember, the Auditor General gave us all the tools we need. Through I think it was Madam Shanahan's questions, but somebody else asking good questions, StatsCan was identified as a good example of doing what needs to be done in the way that it should be done.
I ask through you to our analysts, Chair, using that as our baseline, if they can bring back to us something for us to consider, such as a bit of a template whereby we make this a priority question. We make it clear to all the government deputies and ADMs that we're coming on this issue, and when you get an Auditor General's report for the balance of this Parliament, we're going to have pointed questions.
The Auditor General said there hasn't been, in his opinion, enough pointed questions. He's recommending to us in his gentle, diplomatic way that departments are not necessarily being questioned in the way they should be, and that we ought not take at face value some of the issues around data collection and what's acceptable—i.e. percentages, etc.—and what's not. We need to identify the fact that it's not as if the government has to create something new, because in order to come up with those clean audits that I was bragging about a little while ago, they have to have the instruments in place that allow them to manage data.
We have every opportunity here, Chair, to put a template in place that says for this Parliament and for the next few years, this is going to be a priority for us. It will be macro overall and everything coming in. I think in doing that, Chair, we can also carry this message to our national conference, because this is fairly new in terms of its obviousness, if I can say that. We have the work of the AG and the work of this committee, and the two together will allow us to address this issue on a macro basis and do ultimately what we're trying to do, which is change behaviour.
Thank you, Chair.