Maybe it's just the reason you guys get along so well.
Even though you've been at eight other committees, I put it to you that this is the committee you should be coming to more frequently, more regularly. People should take note that the name of this committee is government operations and estimates. We don't want to wait until after the fact to study your spending of the public accounts to say whether or not it was fruitful, or useful, or whether or not the model was good, or that there's a yardstick to measure progress by.
Speaking of committees, the poor, much-beleaguered Parliamentary Budget Officer is sitting before a committee as we speak in another part of this building. Perhaps the only office that really has fulfilled its mandate coming out of the Federal Accountability Act is the Parliamentary Budget Officer. I argue that we need him more now than ever, when these billions of dollars are flying out the door at breakneck speed.
First of all, you haven't been abundantly clear about the model you've used or the expectations you expect to realize, or the yardstick for measuring progress by for the spending. But you also can't tell me that you can fast-track this amount of spending without sacrificing some due diligence, some oversight, some of the normal accountability associated with infrastructure spending. With the urgency that you've gone into this, with special vote 35, etc., how do you expect your bureaucrats, your team, your skilled and qualified people, to apply the same kind of oversight to this scattergun, free-for-all spending as they do to a normal spending cycle?