The government organizes information already on a program activity basis, so this information already exists, and this information is provided in a parallel fashion in the way you vote this supply process. It's actually not a new thing.
We're ready to launch this. We've been working on this for some period of time. I was at the Treasury Board Secretariat when we launched this exercise, and we did it because we wanted to have more transparency. We wanted to give government an opportunity to do strategic review, not on a high level basis but on a gritty basis.
If you organize that information differently and you change the control gate—you could argue it could be used in a proper way, not just by members of cabinet but also by deputy ministers in some sense too—and if you don't go to a U.S.-style system where you're dealing with appropriation bills that are this big, so something like 10 or 15 per department, I think it would incentivize people. I think people would just understand it more than voting on a grant and contribution for $8 billion that exists, say, in Aboriginal and Northern Affairs Canada. If you were voting on aboriginal education, or water, or health issues, or economic development, you would understand that. It would make more sense for people in the ridings, and I don't think it would be overwhelming.
It already exists now. We provide this information, but you just don't vote on it.
You could move that system. Could you actually launch it with one or two departments to test it out? That was the context in which the Auditor General talked about financial reform. Could you try that? It's possible, and if you're interested in doing it, tell us to do it. Tell the bureaucrats to do this and we will do it for you. We could work collaboratively. I'm saying that perhaps not just as the Parliamentary Budget Officer, but as someone who has worked in all these central agencies. We are actually here to work for you. It may not always seem that way, but we are here to do that for you, and if that's what you want, we can do that.