Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you, witnesses, for your presentations today.
This is my first pre-budget meeting, and what I seem to be hearing is that over the past several years the federal government has gotten into negotiations with provinces, universities, municipalities, and cities. I think what we've seen is that the line of responsibility and the line of where funding should go and how it should be applied has become so blurred that we don't really even understand how the funding happens and how the funding is disbursed.
I've spoken to a lot of people whose greatest fear is that every time an announcement is made of transfers of funding to the provinces, they'll take that amount out of the province's current budget and backfill it with the amount that's being sent over by the federal government.
I think that has created the need for dedicated funding. You get into jurisdictional arguments all the time with provinces. We saw that in the recent health announcement by the previous government--$41 billion and no accountability or no outcome results that we can measure to see if the money actually did what it was intended to do.
My question for all of you--and I think it could be answered very quickly--is this. Would you agree that the lines of responsibility have to be re-established between the federal government and other jurisdictions and also maintained?