Well, I think I touched on it a little in the sense that the Treasury Board has done a good job in the last 10 years in trying to make the data more usable in terms of putting in multi-year information. We never even used to have that; you used to have to go and look at previous years.
I think the DPRs and the program architecture and strategic outcomes template they use is actually not a bad way of explaining what they're up to. The piece we don't have is any kind of reconciliation between the numbers—the votes that are sought—and the architecture. Now, you're getting the random musings of a political junkie, but I think we need to look at how the costing and the votes that Parliament approves directly align with the program architecture and outcomes. If a certain department says it's going to do something, then all costs associated with that are grouped in a vote, as opposed to, say, the foreign affairs department, where half of their voted allocation is called “operating expenditures”. Where does that get you? I'm not criticizing them, but you can't extract anything useful from that.
Again I would suggest you consult with people who know more about this than I do, but I think that if you can work backwards from what government's doing and cost it, you're going to have a better idea of what they're spending. You're also going to be able to compare things by asking, based on ratios, why one department can do it for this amount of money, while another department's spending that much more. You'll get some best practices being shared, potentially.
Right now it's very hard to get anything useful out of the mountain of information that's plopped on MPs' desks once a year, or three times a year if you include the supplementary estimates. It is a difficult task.