They have the information, sir, but we have to basically reconcile what's in the budget to what's in the information base of the Treasury Board Secretariat, broken down by department. We need to get at the operational spending component of this.
We then go specifically to the service delivery question, sir. We need to know the strategies to find those savings department by department. The strategies are important to assess the risk.
When I said that I think the measure is ill-defined, it's because we don't know if every department is going to be treated in the same way or if some departments are going to be treated differently. There's a difference between cutting a policy type of department, such as the Treasury Board Secretariat, or cutting a department such as the coast guard, border services, or Correctional Service of Canada, etc.
Sir, we then need to know the service level standards. A lot of departments have good information on service level standards. I've worked at Agriculture Canada. They can tell you, sir, what the processing time is to provide a stabilization cheque to a farmer, a crop insurance cheque, for example. What are those service level standards?
We then need a full breakdown of the costs for the types of programs that are going to be affected. We can then tell you, sir, whether or not there is a downstream type of risk.
We have learned lessons in the past. I think it goes to Mr. Warkentin's question. Back in the 1990s, when we had a significant public debt crisis, we cut very deeply. We significantly cut capital to save operational spending. We need to know the relationship between operations and capital in this plan.
We can put a very well-defined request for information. As I said, we requested planned five-year reference levels for Treasury Board Secretariat in the summer of 2009. We were told it's a cabinet confidence, but we don't think it should be a cabinet confidence. We think you absolutely need the information in order to do assessment work on the impact of this operational freeze.