In terms of the management of the program, I suppose clarity is always good. To pick up on the point, what I was suggesting is that if we align the votes—the authorities to seek the money—with the outcomes, then it really depends on how you define the outcome.
A program like that is fairly stand-alone. You can say what you intend to do; for instance, you can say you intend to put a specific amount of money on the table to encourage people to take old vehicles off the road for the following reasons. I'm just making this up. Clearly there are environmental issues—older cars pollute more—and buying newer cars stimulates the economy.
Going back to what I said about baselines and benchmarks, you have to have some measurable, independently verifiable objectives to decide whether or not you're accomplishing those goals.
The way the process works now is that you're just asked for the money at the front end. Nobody is really reconciling whether or not it worked. There is so much to do that we never get around to that reconciliation. If the government or the bureaucracy has to outline what they're doing and why they're doing it and how you'll know if they've done it before you say yes or no to giving them the money, that's a step forward.
Anything that can work backwards from those sorts of things is useful. It certainly would be better if they put a price tag and some objectives on that program, rather than just lumping it in to operating costs or however they would do it under the transport estimates or Industry Canada, or whoever is running it.