Actually, the July 31 date was an arbitrary deadline that was set, asking crown corporations to report up to that period.
You'll notice that there was another amendment, a technical change in that section where we replaced “fiscal” with “financial” year. I guess that was to correct a legal error when the legislation was first introduced. Crown corporations operate on financial years that are not always aligned with the Government of Canada fiscal year. There was some confusion on the reporting period, given that crown corporations have different financial years, with some ending in December and some ending in July. What was effectively happening with the annual report with this July 31 deadline was that sometimes you would get information that was 18 months out of date by the time the report was tabled.
We are proposing that because the crown corporations already have an existing legislative requirement to produce quarterly financial statements, those would be consolidated on a quarterly basis, thereby removing that reporting timeline. The idea that we're introducing reporting “as soon as feasible” is to recognize that at every quarter, crowns have 60 days to make their information public. Once the Treasury Board Secretariat receives that information, we will compile it as soon as possible after that 60 days, consolidate it, and make it publicly available.
It also recognizes that as we're moving to more modern, accessible, online formats, the time it will take to consolidate these reports may get shorter over time. As it stands, it takes about 60 days for the Treasury Board to produce these annual reports to consolidate all the information. We're hoping this will be expedient.