There are positives and negatives to virtually every kind of mechanism we explore. It's a policy decision at the end of the day for Parliament, but we are looking at a number of options to propose. The New Zealand model, which can compared with the U.K. model and that of some of the other provinces in Canada, has a role for the parliamentary committee where the expenditures that officers of Parliament would like to have are considered. We already have a model in Parliament whereby the Parliamentary Budget Officer or the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner have an independent funding mechanism. That is well-known by parliamentarians, and it could work for us.
There's the model that Mr. Ferguson proposed, where you link the funding of the agents of Parliament to metrics that relate to the work that they do, the mandated functions. For the Auditor General, it might be the overall government program expenditures that the Auditor General suggested. For another agent of Parliament, it might be connected to the complaints or the workload they have.
I guess the crux of this—and we appreciate the support of the committee in this regard—is that we would like a model that doesn't require us to seek the funding through the departments that we have to audit.