Thank you, Mr. Chair.
It's very nice to see you again, Mr. Giroux. It's a pleasure to have you here at our committee to discuss budget 2023.
I read your report with interest. The first thing I want to ask you about is this phenomenon of non-announced measures. It's a concern that's come up before. It came up in the fall economic statement, and even before that. You highlighted in your report that you identified $798 million in new non-announced measures, bringing the total, I think you said, in excess of $12 billion.
For those who might be watching who don't know what non-announced measures are, the government is essentially asking us to vote to allow spending when we don't know at all what it's for. Essentially, it's giving the government a literal blank cheque of $12 billion.
I think you said in your testimony before that the difficulty you have with this is that it's very difficult from an accounting perspective to understand, once the money is spent, what it was actually spent on. There are two problems here. First, there's a major transparency problem when parliamentarians are asked to approve monies and they don't know what they're for. Second, there's a major accountability problem, because after the fact, it's impossible to find out what the money was spent on.
I'm wondering if you could comment on that issue.