Government Operations committee  I don't know if it would work to specify that kind of thing. But, for instance, the agriculture department has an enormously huge program and it's clear there are quite diverse things that they're trying to do. I think it's the diversity rather than size that is the greater issue

Government Operations committee  I don't recall if it's in any of these, but what I certainly recommended over the years was that this would be the kind of staff work whereby a financial group would work with each of the committees, as we advise elsewhere, to look at what would be the best way to sort this out,

Government Operations committee  You asked two other questions. One is on how you would go about informing, educating, in a sense, members of other committees about the importance of the estimates process. I thought Peter is by far in the best position to answer that. He's been in the business for a long time.

Government Operations committee  This is probably going to be longer than you intended. Just by way of context, I'll note a couple of things. I think I mentioned—maybe I didn't—that you had Mr. Williams here, who talked a little bit about the Global Organization of Parliamentarians Against Corruption. I served

Government Operations committee  In many ways, the performance audit methodology the Auditor General of Canada uses and which is used in many other countries in the world is a little bit hard to understand, in the sense that they say they're not looking at performance, but they do come awfully close to doing so.

Government Operations committee  I have to declare a possible conflict of interest. I was one of the officials innately involved in the defining of those some 15 or 20 years ago. They've never lived up to my expectations, but nonetheless, I think they are potentially useful. But they are inevitably useless if

Government Operations committee  I'll leave number three for you. Question number one concerns the key barriers. I might be dreaming in technicolour here, but it seems to me that there is a huge job to be done, and I think it rests with this committee to really look into the process of oversight at the program

Government Operations committee  I'll address question one—

Government Operations committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm going to go into a bit more depth, particularly on the study for the Institute for Research on Public Policy. I think that is a bit dated now. It's almost 10 years old. It was one thing where we looked at, not the estimates