Thank you for your support, Mr. Martin.
Your first point was about withholding and the link between withholding and misinformation. As budget officers, we're not auditors, so we're not actually using audit tools to go back and say whether appropriate procedures were followed. That's definitely important work, and I'm sure that it will take place at some point in time.
As budget officers, we tend to look forward. We think, as we've said, that there are some good things in the reporting we do. We're thankful that Parliament and the executive have come forward with these quarterly budget implementation reports. We think that the fourth-quarter report can be better than the third-quarter and second-quarter reports. When we first looked at this information in the first-quarter report, with limited information on authorities, we thought, okay. Then on the second-quarter report, we got information on commitments. We were thinking that by the time we got to the third-quarter report on budget implementation, we would start to see some information on expenditures disbursements related to the programs. Is this stuff having an impact that went beyond this commitment? We haven't seen it, but we are hopeful that in the fourth-quarter report we will maybe start to see the turning. We'll start to see in this information on projects not only the level of commitment but the money going out the door. We're hopeful about that.
With respect to the template, sir, we designed those templates based on the kind of information we know Treasury Board demands the departments be in a position to provide to the President of the Treasury Board. So in a sense, there's nothing in those templates, for all programs across the government, that public servants shouldn't want to provide. We think those templates are a best practice. We also looked not just at Canada and Treasury Board policies; we wanted to make sure they were consistent with best practices in other countries.