You have raised two points.
The first is the fact that the federal budget and the estimates will be better aligned, that is to say the parliamentary appropriations which you, as parliamentarians, must make decisions about. I think this is an improvement to transparency. According to the old presentation, budget measures were subject to a vote; parliamentarians had to approve them. This year, we have a new way of doing things. From now on, the Treasury Board Secretariat and the government present certain budget measures by department. It is now possible to match budget measures and parliamentary votes on which you must make decisions. I think this is an improvement.
However, this does not fully meet some of the criticism addressed to the government, according to which parliamentarians must speak out on budget items before Treasury Board has carried out its meticulous review of them. It is possible that changes will be made after parliamentarians vote on the appropriations. That criticism remains valid, but in my opinion, there are not many ways to remedy this unless we change the very structure of parliamentary appropriations.
In your question you also raise the matter of measures that have not been announced. There has also been an improvement in that regard, as compared to the transparency of previous budgets. However, there are a lot of unannounced measures. In fact, we do not know the exact number but the amounts are rather large. That said, it is a bit surprising that there is a negative amount in the 2019 budget.
There is a negative of $3.8 billion over a five- or six-year horizon. This suggests two possibilities, or a combination of both; a decrease in expenditures that have already been provisioned, or increases in taxes and tariffs. Without having details, we can't know whether these are expenditure reductions or funds that are no longer needed, so that budget space has been freed up. There is a lot of uncertainty about that.
The upside is that in the past, that uncertainty would not even have been mentioned. Today, we mention the existence of a large amount that corresponds to unannounced measures or expenses. We mention their impact, but the measures themselves are not specified.