I appreciate that.
There are two other questions I want to ask you. I think it's really important that the committee hear clearly that you don't have the information, because in the last hour we heard it was all there somewhere in the estimates, that we just had to look harder for it. It turned out to be “no” to two of the questions I asked, and it sounds like it's “no” to quite a few things.
The two questions I have are very particular. One is on the infrastructure. You've provided an information update showing that only a certain percentage of projects got completed last year--about 17%--by December 31. In terms of the possibility of lapsing, there are some qualifications to what you've been able to do with the data. I guess there's a general question I'd like to ask. I'm going to give you both of my questions so that you can allocate the couple of minutes we have.
Are we able, as a committee, as a Parliament, to really know the value of our infrastructure spending based on the information you have? We're now halfway through. You gave us some cautions last spring and you asked for certain things, so I'm asking for an opinion, whether you can render it today or it would be qualified by what you would need.
How well has the government done? How well have we done as a Parliament in being able to make sure that we're delivering value for Canadians and against the objectives the government has set for itself with this business of being timely, targeted to need, and temporary? I think we're in jeopardy of losing any sense of control over this when I see that the only information you can give us is partial and fragmented.
Second, I'm interested in the functioning of your office: whether you have the budget now that you need, whether you have access to it in the right fashion, and whether there's anything else we need to know about your ability to operate in these times. We have extra expenditures in the government's requisition, and we're trying to understand how that is going to work in the public interest, and now we have freezes that could be harmful. Can you and are you able to use the dollars in a way that will give us part of what we need as parliamentarians to oversee this?