To continue on the point of the mountain of paperwork that it would involve, there are two paths before us. One is a mountain of paper, millions of pages, that would take a long time for everyone to review. The other path would be one of efficiency and clarity. I think the path of having oral testimony from the officials—witnesses—who actually run these programs would be very helpful.
When we look at the massive paper production, it would involve a small army of public servants to find these documents, requiring overtime. It would also take another army of committee staff to try to make sense of them. I have already related the amount of time that it took for us to do this in another public accounts study.
I just feel that by the time anyone reads—I don't know—page 500,000, the information will be obsolete. The program will have moved on and taxpayers would have had to foot an enormous bill, whether it was overtime for the public servants or overtime for committee staff, plus translation costs, and also the amount of paper and the use of computer time. All of that would take millions of dollars in administrative costs, and I don't think that would serve the taxpayers well.
Also, I would not want to divert the committee staff from the work at hand. Currently, we have seven draft reports to review, several outstanding AG reports to study and five new reports coming this upcoming week with the Auditor General's spring reports, which I'm sure we are all very anxious to discover. I'm sure the chair would like to continue the progress we have made and really delve into finishing up all the work.
The committee staff—