My understanding is that as committees we are masters of what we do and we're free to ask whatever we like. We can go into detail and they will give us whatever authority they have in terms of that. We can also question the minister as to what his or her plans are. That kind of question is relevant and it's certainly possible.
Perhaps you need to understand the real process about how something is approved or not approved. The budget is basically a statement of policy for the future. From that, different departments will prepare submissions to cabinet. Cabinet will approve them or not, then after that they will do a submission to Treasury Board. So there's a real process before the money is actually allocated to a program.
Then there are other programs where there are standard amounts put aside. Madam Thibault mentioned the repair of wharves. Probably, and I don't know within which department, there might be an amount put aside to do repairs. I don't know, maybe they've stopped doing repairs completely, but these are the kinds of things you can ask about. I mean, is there any budget in that department to do anything of that magnitude? Maybe there's not, but those are the forms of questions.
It gets a little complicated to follow through the whole process, but in the end it's really quite simple: you get a budget, the budget basically states the intentions of the government; each minister who has something in that budget then has to prepare a submission to cabinet, probably cabinet committee and then full cabinet; from that point on, once it's approved, they have to actually build the program, if it's a new program. They would then go to Treasury Board and ask for an allocation and could be questioned on it--have you done the right thing and so on. Those are the broad lines of how it essentially works.
You can add to that, if you will, because you're on the other side of it. I was on one side of it and you were on the other side of it. That's a simplistic way of putting it, but it's fairly accurate. Am I correct?