I want to build on something the other members talked about. This isn't the first time this problem has been studied. It was the same committee in 2003 that said, and I quote:
Each year, some 87 departments and other government organizations provide parliamentary committees with separate spending estimates and related reports, and many of these receive no formal attention in committee meetings. And when meetings occur, they are typically dominated by partisan exchanges with ministers that shed minimal light on the estimates. Consideration of the supplementary estimates, which allow departments to obtain additional funding at specified intervals during the year, has been even less satisfactory. With only a few exceptions, committees regularly fail to examine them at all.
Let's have no illusions here. This is a partisan place and people have their partisan underwear on everywhere they go. Is there some way we can improve that situation by restricting our focus to estimates and removing some of that partisanship? Maybe looking at some of these other parliaments could give us some ideas that we could explore in this study.