Thank you, Madam Chair.
I will continue with Professor Godbout on the issue of accounting for current expenditures versus investments.
We understand that governments have current expenditures and that they make certain investments. These investments may be recorded on the infrastructure balance sheet, as is the case in Quebec. Furthermore, we can amortize a certain portion of them in the current budget over a number of years, for example. So, this is the logic by which they are accounted for, for instance in Quebec. This is also what the United Kingdom, a unitary state, does.
In the Canadian context—the committee had asked officials to perform the calculations some time ago—I believe that around 4% of public capital in Canada is federally owned. Of this percentage, the majority of the assets are already accounted for under private-sector accounting: airports, ports, among others. It turns out, therefore, that there is virtually no true public capital at the federal level.
Furthermore, when you do the accounting—as the government tried to do to explain that these amounts weren't really expenditures—it ends up being transfers that the provinces convert into investments and record on their books, as in the Quebec infrastructure plan.
This leads to situations where security at FIFA World Cup matches becomes an investment in the budget. That's what we saw this fall. I won't ask you whether this is an investment or not, because I think it's getting ridiculous.
In the federal context, where there is almost no capital, how can we establish a credible framework so we don't end up with a farce like the one we saw in the last budget?