Public Accounts committee  I don't have that at my fingertips. Perhaps as the questioning goes on, one of my colleagues can give me the date, and I'll give it back to you.

Public Accounts committee  There are two parts to your question, I think. One is why do we have so many agreements, and then the second part is why do we have different agreements. We have a large number of agreements in some cases because we respond to the accountability requirements of the client with wh

Public Accounts committee  I'm asking my colleague, Mr. McAuley, for the term of the officer who is responsible for such matters in the Department of Justice. I'll ask for that title in a moment. We have timekeeping now.

Public Accounts committee  I'll get that date for you in just a minute. We have had timekeeping for the last short period of time. This will allow us to build information on how much money is being spent on different classes of files. We will be able to do trend analysis with clients. That data is accumula

Public Accounts committee  Yes, there is. I'm sorry if my answer seemed confusing. It's not called a comptroller; it's the chief financial officer. Of course we have a chief financial officer, and timekeeping has been in since December 2006.

Public Accounts committee  The lawyers who provide the legal services to departments and who are co-located with them work for the Department of Justice. I have their data and I report it now to Parliament. But some of the costs, which are related to the full delivery of service, would include the cost of

Public Accounts committee  It was a billion dollars at the time of the audit, but since then the office of the Public Prosecution Service of Canada has left, taking money with it, so the budget is closer to $600 million.

Public Accounts committee  Yes.

Public Accounts committee  I don't have that information. I have some information from other sectors that goes to a recognition that the nature of legal problems in the last period of time has increased in complexity tremendously. Certain court processes now take more time and court days than they used to,

Public Accounts committee  I think you ask a really interesting question, and I don't think I have a complete answer. I'm not sure if anybody does. First of all, it's important to recognize that we respond to demands for service. So we were getting bigger--we're not now--in response to increased demand fro

Public Accounts committee  Just to understand your question, you're picturing a client calling the Department of Justice and wanting--

Public Accounts committee  So a client speaks to one of our lawyers, probably a lawyer who is co-located with the client in one of the departmental legal services units. Let's imagine it's at the Department of Fisheries. Because it's a lawyer the client has a lot of dealings with, the first thing the lawye

Public Accounts committee  Speaking for me and what we're doing now, we are determined to address the questions the Auditor General has raised. The whole management of the public sector is, I think, more rigorous and vigorous than it has been in the past. It's in our self-interest to get these systems ri

Public Accounts committee  And we've had service standards and financial arrangements developed in different pockets historically, over time. One of the big challenges that's been identified, I think, in the Auditor General's report is to get global standards, uniform standards, national standards, and th

Public Accounts committee  No.