There's an important opportunity this year for the budget. Measures have to be reflected in the reports on plans and priorities. Last year, for example, after the budget was tabled, a historic investment in infrastructure...parliamentarians were still working with essentially obsolete reports on plans and priorities, so ensuring that they have the right content, first of all, is really important, and there's an opportunity today.
I think it also goes back to the message I made earlier, which was that it's important for parliamentarians to receive the information the same way the government manages its resources. If it's highly aggregated or in a different accounting language—cash versus accrual—or with high-level votes, and you're not actually voting on the program activities, you're voting on a high-level vote structure, there isn't a lot of incentive for people within the government to manage on that basis and report to you on that basis. Ideally, you're getting a report on plans and priorities that is outlining the government's spending plan for the year.
Then you have quarterly financial reports that come out and tell you whether they're on track. Then the departmental performance report is produced soon after the end of the fiscal year to let you know how they did. Right now the DPR is produced far later. You get public accounts some 200 days after the end of the fiscal year, so you're appropriating money in main estimates for the following year without having the public accounts tabled for the prior year. We have a lot of these—the reporting and the management when these documents are tabled—out of sync right now, and at the level of aggregation.
Our advice is that you have control gates because you're voting on program activity. If the information isn't coming to you, then it's a serious problem for somebody because they're having to manage those program activities within the government. If you're not getting the variances on budget or on performance measures, you have very good lines of inquiry when they come to committee. But once you're voting on that basis, they have to manage on that basis. That's the fundamental opportunity for change in the estimates reform proposed by the government.