Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you for inviting me to here with my colleague, Marie-Claude Bibeau, to discuss the 2016-17 main estimates.
We are accompanied by key senior officials, Peter M. Boehm, deputy minister of international development, and Arun Thangaraj, who has the impressive title of assistant deputy minister and chief financial officer for corporate planning, finance and information technology. In other words, if there is anyone here who knows everything, it's him.
Also with us is Daniel Jean, who will stay on as deputy minister of Foreign Affairs for a bit longer. I am not surprised that the Prime Minister took him away from me to have him closer to him. I look forward with great interest to the work I will do with the next deputy minister assigned to me. I am told he is excellent. His current minister says he is a very talented senior public servant. We will really need him given the wonderful work Mr. Jean did under the previous and the current government.
The exercise we are about to conduct is important. Ms. Bibeau and I will try not to speak for too long so we have the time to consider the budget document, which is essential to the quality of our parliamentary democracy and the transparency we deserve. It is difficult to be transparent in the sense that the document is fairly technical. There are some essential points that I have to clarify and that will facilitate our work, I am sure.
The main estimates represent the department's projected expenditures for the current fiscal year, but I should note here, for the committee, that given the timeline for preparing and tabling the main estimates each year and the proximity of this to the budget speech, most budget announcements will instead flow in the supplementary estimates rather than the main estimates.
We will have plenty of opportunities throughout the year to exercise parliamentary oversight of these expenditures. That said, there are a few key areas I would like to highlight now before turning it over to Minister Bibeau.
The department had a net decrease of its budget of $11.3 million, if you look at these estimates, over the last year's main estimates. That's $11.3 million out of a budget of roughly $1.5 billion. How can this decrease be explained? This is what I will do now.
The decrease is mainly due to the program renewal schedules for both the stabilization and reconstruction task force, START, and the global peace and security fund. These sunsetting programs appear as a drop of $130 million in these main estimates, but new funding was announced in budget 2016. This new funding of $450 million over the next three years to renew the fund will be brought before Parliament as part of the supplementary estimates process. I hope you follow me.
There are also a few other smaller items that account for the differences between this year and last year. These include initiatives related to sunsetting funding for security upgrades and real property projects, as well as other technical adjustments that are contained in these main estimates.
Also, our operations at home and missions abroad, like so many other sectors across our economy, have not been immune to currency fluctuations. As a result, there is an increase of $62 million in the cost of payments made from Canada in foreign currencies and around $40 million for fluctuations affecting payments by our missions abroad.
Taken together, these account for the vast majority of the variance you see in the estimates before you. When looking at the main estimates by program, you will note that there has been a decrease in international security, democratic development, and international development. For the former, this reflects the sunsetting of funding of the START program I just mentioned.
As I mentioned, new funding was announced in budget 2016 and will be sought through the supplementary estimates process. The variance with respect to the international development program reflects the increased demand for humanitarian assistance, and you can see the resulting shift from this program to the humanitarian assistance program.
Madam Bibeau will have more to say about that.
I hope I have anticipated some of your questions and made the document clearer.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.