Thank you.
Auditor General, I'd like to ask you a question about program auditing.
My background is in business, and I was a professional accountant. Of course I was used to preparing and auditing financial statements in a business environment. Program auditing is obviously different, as you're looking at more than just money. You're looking at the effectiveness of programming, etc.
In the estimates there are many cross-departmental programs or horizontal items. Basically, Finance Canada and the Treasury Board earmark money to one department, like Environment Canada, for example, for planting trees, and then the environment department transfers that money to Natural Resources to deliver the program. It's basically a financial shell game that allows ministers to abandon responsibility for money and programming in their departments.
Two weeks ago at this committee Minister Wilkinson said, “As you will know, most of the tree-planting activity [is] a natural resources-related function”. The minister's mandate letter from the Prime Minister says that the Minister of the Environment is “to operationalize the plan to plant two billion incremental trees over the next 10 years”.
When ministers such as Minister Wilkinson refuse to take responsibility for programs they are mandated with and responsible for under the voted estimates, do you find, from a program auditing perspective, that these types of programs are destined to fail?