Thank you for the question. I can provide the information I have, which is only partial. We may need to pursue it more afterwards.
What's important, and the point I'm trying to get across, is that in our view the question is how far through the system of budgeting and then into appropriations to recommend going. There's a clear commitment on the part of the government to use accrual accounting approaches to the maximum extent possible. It's also obviously important that we present consistent information to Parliament.
The balance that has been struck so far is that cabinet-level decisions—the larger financial decisions, if you like—are taken explicitly and completely on an accrual budgeting basis. The large biases against cash purchases, for example, that were implicit in a pure cash or even modified cash accounting such as we had in the past have been removed for the government's large decisions, those that feature in budgets or are large enough to require cabinet decisions. In terms of budgeting, we're talking, generally speaking, about the smaller departmental-level decisions.
The next step, though, is to ask how we can push it further and increase the consistency of what we present to Parliament. It is certainly true that the Minister of Finance comes to Parliament with a budget and a fiscal framework on an accruals basis, and yet parliamentarians are voting on something close to cash. That is not an ideal situation; we certainly recognize that.
What we are trying to make sure is that, when we come to Parliament to consult on how to improve the situation, we have very robust models to suggest to you and we are clear. As the Comptroller General has just mentioned, it is a practice in other countries, and I think likely to be the case, that we would need to consider carefully the possibility of moving to multi-year appropriations. It's certainly the experience in New Zealand, which is the pioneer in accrual appropriations, that in order to be able on the one hand to vote on amortization and on the other hand to allow managers to purchase assets, they would need access to future years' amortizations that in a sense have been voted through in initial cash but are still in future years' appropriations. That is a step the Parliament of Canada has not taken in the past.
We want to be able to come to Parliament and say with very considerable confidence, because we, or certainly I, view the robustness and quality of the main estimates as being a key deliverable for the President of the Treasury Board and for me—it's one of my key responsibilities. If we're going to change those, we need to be able to come to you and say that to make progress, we will need to change the estimates form and nature in the following ways.
We want to make sure it's a robust statement. So we've not taken the decision to go slow; we've taken the decision to come with confidence. I think all parts of the secretariat and the Comptroller General's Office are united in the desire to give you robust, reliable information.
Other countries have been concerned about the fact that by the very nature of things we will have to continue to look at both cash and accrual information. That is the view of all jurisdictions I've encountered, certainly, and it seems correct. It is inescapable. We would be looking at voting on an appropriations basis and yet keeping track of cash. Structuring that in a way that parliamentarians find useful is part of the equation as well.