One of the things I was tasked to do in the budget, beyond this, was to bring in a new expenditure management system for the government. Our expenditure management system is weak at best. We went through the big period of high deficits, and the focus was so much on spending reductions, there became a lack of focus on how we deal with increases in spending, or how we deal with the competing pressures for increases in spending.
I think it's important to constantly evaluate programs to find out if they're meeting with success. I'm working on bringing a proposal to my colleagues on that issue. We're doing a lot of work, and the officials have been incredibly busy. But at this stage, we don't have anything to report, and I haven't been back to my colleagues.
A tenet I believe is that we should look periodically at every dollar that's being spent and ask if we're getting results. Are we getting value for our money, and is the program doing what it was intended to do?
I don't know many people who send their money back to the government as a grant saying we don't need this any more, or we haven't met with success, so you can have the money back.
Sometimes you have to ask difficult questions in government. We're going to ask the tough questions to make sure that the taxpayers' money is spent wisely and well.