Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for York South--Weston and I recognize the minor error. I would just say that from the viewpoint of Hamilton, when we thought Toronto, we thought the hon. member. I was pleased to have been in the municipal world when the hon. member was there.
The member raises some very good points. I do not think I am in any way avoiding the answer, but to step it out one, Justice Gomery made quite a number of recommendations as a result of his inquiry. Many of those affected the public accounts committee. I am pleased to say that I am back on that committee again. I am looking forward to the work that will go on there.
However, I would say to the hon. member that there were a number of things flowing from the inquiry that could also be in Bill C-2. I recall that for the actual public accounts committee itself, Justice Gomery said there should be more resources and more independence. The member will recall that there times when we wanted to get further legal advice; it was more a matter of having a staff assignment rather than a question of whether or not they could be unbiased, and I want to be very clear about that. It was a matter of having the resources, in other words, of having a staff lawyer assigned to the committee who would be with us and know the corporate history and the issues and be able to give us advice along the way. Because it was a very legal process we went through, in that it involved personal information, people's rights, et cetera.
There is another thing that the committee would have been given the power to do had Bill C-2 incorporated those recommendations. The committee would have been given the power to ensure that deputy ministers were held accountable for their legal responsibility. Right now in terms of transparency and accountability, the minister rolls in and says, “I make the policy decisions and the department is run by the deputy, so I really cannot answer that one because it is about the mechanics of the ministry”. The minister says to speak to the deputy.
Okay, so we bring in the deputy minister. He rolls in and we ask the deputy, who says he can speak to some of the mechanics of what happened, but that most of this relates back to the policy and he does not make policy decisions, that the minister does. The deputy says we need to ask the minister. I am not making this up. This is how it works and anybody who was on the committee watched this.
Then we get to the second and third tiers of the bureaucrats in trying to get at the answer, and of course when it is a political issue, they are not going to get involved if they do not have to because there is no win. But deputy ministers have a legal framework of responsibility and Justice Gomery was saying that it should extend to going to the public accounts committee and answering for all decisions made by the deputy or his or her staff with regard to all areas of legal responsibility. It would end the ability to have this merry-go-round whereby one person comes in and says it is not really his or her job, but to ask so-and-so. When so-and-so comes in, the answer is no, we have to go back to someone else. We can go around and around with this.
Had Bill C-2 incorporated this, we could--