Thanks, Kevin. I'd like to build on what you said because you really nailed it.
To me, Chandra, what made it work was that we were all goal-oriented. Our goal was to have the best report we could and to be unanimous. Chandra, you and I would often be at odds at our starting point. We would look at something, and I would say, “I think that's a huge deal,” and you would say, “Well, it's important, but I'm not sure it's huge.” We would always find a way to come to an agreement because we knew that our goal was not to make a great speech. Our goal was to get a unanimous report that reflected the findings of the Auditor General and our political will to see it done. I want to underscore that.
I appreciate Kevin mentioning Alexandra a couple of times, because she, to me, is the poster child for what it is to be a parliamentarian on a PACP committee. I'll take 30 seconds to give you an example. It was in the last Parliament, Kevin, and I think it was within months if not weeks before we left to go into the last election. I'm not going to recreate the dynamic, but we were in a big political problem, and it was necessary for the committee to do its job and criticize the government on a big deal. Alexandra, as the government lead, was the one who was prepared to make sure the government side agreed in principle with the issue at hand, but we had to find language. That's the one that Kevin was actually referring to.
It was so sensitive. We were heading into the election. We wanted to remain united, but, hey, I wasn't running again, though I knew that everybody on the Liberal side was. I had to put some water in my wine and understand the politics of where they were. At the end of the day, because of that respect of stepping into each other's shoes, we were able to find language in which the committee unanimously condemned the government in writing. It was a special letter that went out. It was a big deal.
This was not in Alexandra's best interest. This was not in the interest of her party, but it was in the interest of Parliament and the Canadian taxpayer. She made that a priority over her party and her own re-election. To me, that—and the fact that Kevin, as a Conservative, would be the one to first raise the role that Alexandra played as a Liberal—points to the fact that when we see each other and we're talking about public accounts, we don't see those partisan lines. They don't exist. All we see is another parliamentarian. We're on the same team, and our job is to make sure the government of the day is held accountable for the way that money is spent and implemented.
That means the deputy is held to account. Remember, one of our mottos is, when a deputy minister finds out they've been asked to appear before the public accounts committee as a witness, it should ruin their whole week because they would know they're being chosen because there's a problem and they're going to have to face the music.
There is another thing I want to leave everybody with. At the end of the day, what you're trying to do is change behaviour, not say “Gotcha!” That means that if you're doing your job, you have deputies and assistant deputies who are thinking ahead as they're looking at a problem in front of them and realizing that if this isn't handled right, they're going to end up in front of the public accounts committee, and we know what happens when you get there.
You only get that reputation by doing two things, in my opinion. The first is to criticize where it is necessary, and a government member commenting on the inefficiencies of a department carries a lot more weight than an opposition member, because that's what you expect. Second, what I learned in the last few years was how powerful it was for me, as a member of a third party—as far away as you could get from government in that room—to compliment the department when they did something right.
If you don't compliment them on what they're doing right, and you attack them when they're wrong, they walk around saying, “I can't win with that public accounts committee no matter what I do. Their job is to make my life hell and to make me look bad on TV.” If they're doing something right, especially where they're fixing something, go out of your way—and I say this to the opposition members—and take it upon yourself to start out with a compliment. That way the criticisms work better. Compliment them legitimately when they're doing something right and have done something well. That builds personal credibility. I can talk about how I used to be on this committee and segue it into getting re-elected, because I did it five times.
It's not just quietly going along. There's also a political angle to this. You can develop a reputation—as Kevin pointed out—that is different from the one you had. I was known as kind of a firebrand in the House, and all that stuff, and that's why when he saw me on this committee, he thought, “Oh, how are we ever going to get non-partisan with that guy here?”
Yet, what I found was that after I'd been in politics for 35 years, I was getting a kick out of finding a way to bring us all together, rather than getting yet another little headline like “Christopherson attacks government”. Well, that gets weary after a while, and it doesn't do much for you.
However, if you could spend an hour and a half in the committee room and play a bit of a role in helping everybody come together so you could get that unanimous report, you'd have done some really good work. You'd have done work as important as that of a cabinet member, because you were willing to look at the bigger picture and do the job the way it needed to be done.
It's not “Gotcha!” You want to change behaviour. You want the bureaucrats to recognize that when there are steps in a process, there's a reason they're in there. We often find that when we get horrible things like Phoenix, it's a perfect storm of a bunch of little things and one or two big things that went wrong. You put them all together and suddenly you have a boondoggle.
What you want to do is change the behaviour of those bureaucrats, not so you can get a headline saying, “I told the government off”, but so that there are all kinds of bureaucrats who are changing the way they approach their job and changing the way they behave. That's the win.
In a perfect world, we would get an auditor come in with a report saying “Everything's great. See you later.” One time—and I'll end on this, Madam Chair—we had an agency come in, and it was a very small agency. I had never heard of it before. They came in, and there was this amazing report.