Thank you, Mr. Chairman. There is no doubt that that would be valuable for us to be able to present more information publicly. One of the challenges we have consistently faced on this is standardized tests. It is hard to put information out there when the tests are not standardized. It is hard to compare. Even on a national basis, Mr. Chairman, we have had numerous discussions amongst the Ministers of Education across Canada about the consistency of tests. We do the national tests, the SAIP tests. They started about eight to ten years ago. We are getting consistency in the Alberta achievement tests.
I certainly take to heart what the Member is saying and would simply follow through with what he is suggesting, that we do need to get out there and provide more information to show our accountability. That is the question, is the accountability and we require a lot of feedback from each of the jurisdictions in order to do that because each jurisdiction gives us an accountability report, but in some cases over the past decade those reports have been wildly inconsistent in terms of the types of tests that are taken. It is always hard to compare apples and apples, so it has had its challenges.
I do not disagree with the Member that the Members should be involved in this. We do not want to hide information. We do not want to obscure information to the public deliberately to try and say we have the information, but we do not want to put it out there. That is not the point. We want to put the information out there that we know ourselves makes some sense to put together whereby we can say this is a problem, that is a problem. You know, there are some reports that are of value. We did the Towards Excellence report and our post-secondary indicators report. So our reporting in some areas is really good. We provide a lot of data. I think the testing area is evolving and one that we need more consistency and more accountability and we will certainly work towards that.