So it was just around the time.
And you know, obviously with the idea of tightening up financial accountability.... One of the things that is interesting in the bill--I don't know if it caught your eye--is to give cost estimates for private members' bills, which is interesting, because usually you're not allowed to spend money when you're presenting a private member's bill. But there's no initiative to look at government bills. I'd like to get your comment on that, or the logic. Maybe you're not the person to speak to it. It would be important public policy to have that; if you're going to give cost estimates for private members' bills, then you should do the same for government bills.
I'm really interested and very concerned about the estimates process. If we go back to where this bill came from, the Gomery commission, it was about concerns about oversight of spending and the fact that spending became outside of accountability, if you can say that.
I'm a new member of Parliament. I represent a predominantly public service riding, and they said, to a person, when I talked to them: We don't need more overlays like the previous government was intending; we need to be able to breathe a little, to talk about outcome-based policy again, which used to be the way; we want to get there, and we need to come up with some of our own ideas to get there.
But on the estimates--and you've studied provincial governments--it seems to me they do it differently. There's more attention, more time taken to look at the estimates. And here it seems to be--and we saw this with Gomery.... Certainly what came out of there is that attention is given to the public accounts after the money has been spent. And talking to some people, former parliamentarians, it used to be different here in Ottawa. But certainly the experience, and if you could just....
The second question is about the estimates process in other provinces and how that might get to your point about taking the partisanship out of that component, looking at money, cost-benefit analysis, and where it should be placed--at the beginning or at the end of the equation.