Thank you very much.
One thing jumps out in the estimates. If you look at the voted program expenditures, you will see that in 2022-23, the expenditure was $329 million. The budgeted amount in 2023-24 was $128 million. The expenditures to date are $420 million. The budgeted amount for 2024-25 is $145 million.
It brought me back to my early days as Treasury Board critic. I suspect that part of what's going on is that the main estimates and the budget are very poorly aligned because the budget tends to come out after the main estimates. You end up with these irregularities where what ends up being spent out of the estimates and voted authorities really doesn't look a lot like what's projected when the government tables its main estimates.
When we had a fair bit of debate around the government operations and estimates committee table in the 42nd Parliament on these matters, I think there was an impression—I think even then minister Scott Brison, the president of the Treasury Board at that time, had a strong feeling about it—that until there was a fixed budget date, it would be very hard to bring the main estimates and the budget into any kind of meaningful alignment. You need that for the predictability of the budget, and of course, that doesn't have to be a particular day. It could be a window within which a budget would be presented. That would also facilitate some important—and frankly better than the current culture—collaboration between the Treasury Board and the Department of Finance on the budget. I'm not saying there isn't any, but I understand that there are nevertheless some internal barriers there. The end result is that it can be very hard to make sense of the government's financials between the estimates and the budget.
I wonder what your experience is in this regard and whether you would consider trying to move towards, if not a fixed budget day, at least a fixed budget period so that we might have better alignment between the government's budget and the government's estimates. This is so that parliamentarians can do their jobs of financial accountability better and so that Canadians can more easily and readily understand what government proposes in its financial documents.