May I please interrupt you, I want to come back to the issue of criteria.
Did the senior officials and deputy ministers of the various departments have any questions? With regard to the "unused funds" criterion, I gather that the deputy ministers, for whose intelligence I have great esteem, must have thought that unused funds were perfectly usable as such. There are unused funds, but there are many other things that come afterward.
With regard to criteria, we find the expression "programs that were not providing good value for money". We could get together and study government documents and come up with very different opinions about programs that do not provide good value for money. For instance, some colleagues found certain pseudo-legal programs very useful, whereas the government said that they had not been very useful. People do not make claims that are contrary to what their own government wants. There are philosophical reasons for this.
Did these people have a detailed book of specifications? You said that criteria were followed during this exercise. Mr. Moloney, I do presume that public servants respected the criteria: the decisions are up to the government. I would like to know whether the criteria were so strict that they did not leave any choice, or whether they allowed the government to make savings in other ways. Can senior officials find other ways and means, or must they strictly follow the plans provided by the Treasury Board Secretariat or by the Department of Finance?