Thank you very much for your question.
Personally, I will declare that I am biased in favour of the accrual basis of appropriation. There is no question about it. But I also remember that in one of my first discussions with the former chair of the public accounts committee, I told him that if we are moving to the accrual basis of appropriation, that probably means we will have to move to multi-year appropriation. He looked me in the eye and said, “You know, Mr. St-Jean, here we vote money year to year.” I said, “You want accrual, but you don't want multi-year appropriation.”
We need to reconcile that with members of Parliament. If you move to an accrual basis of appropriation, it means you will also need to move to multi-year appropriation. That is one aspect.
The second aspect is that we also try to be extremely respectful of members of Parliament, and I'm going to give you an example to explain what I mean by this.
Last year we booked a liability in the public accounts related to AECL after a public debate or a public judgment that said that the liability for the environmental cleanup was going to be so many billions of dollars. So we booked it in the public accounts of the Government of Canada to show the financial situation. But Parliament has not yet decided if they will be paying that. This is where I say that we really need to be respectful of members of Parliament, because that $2 billion that was declared, members of Parliament haven't said they're going to pay. We're recognizing the liabilities. We're telling it like it is, but you have not given the government the authority to pay that $2 billion, and I would not want to see an accountant making that decision for you.
So that is the dilemma.