Once again, for the whole-of-government statements, the Government of Canada has taken some really bold steps and has been able to manage some of this with some difficulty. I tend to have agreed with all of the decisions they made and how they were going to handle military assets. The difficulty, as you quite rightly say, is that a lot of these don't have a very long life, and it's the difficulty of being able to say, “What am I going to do if they have a very short life?” But the way the financial statements have portrayed the assets of the military in the whole-of-government statements has been done very well.
The issue then comes down to how you are going to push that down to the departmental level. I think it was Madam Fraser who made the point that if you don't account for your stock of assets, then out of sight is out of mind. You get good accountability if you force some discipline in saying, “Here are my significant assets”, because they cost an awful lot. On the cash basis you would just completely write it off, and you won't see it in anybody's set of records because it's been paid, whereas if you're doing the accrual basis, you need then to look after it, maintain it. It has some value.
It's sometimes difficult when talking about it not to oversimplify things and come up to a simplistic level, because there are some really big issues in here, some tough issues, and it's tough to be able to generalize. But I think it's been done fairly well in the whole-of-government statements, and I don't see why that can't be done for the departmental ones.