I'm not an international expert on budget-making, but I'll restate what I said. I believe the budget is a policy statement by the government on what it intends to do. It's not a binding legal piece of paper put on the table that the estimates have to match. There are things in the budget at the present time that change
I'll give you, as an example, MacEachen's first budget in 1981. It proposed capital gains on the transfer of farm sales within a family. That didn't happen. As the groundswell worked its way through Parliament, and whatever, a large part of that budget was never implemented.
So I see it as a policy statement. The Auditor General may see it as a bookkeeping operation. You have five days of debate on the budget, and it's about policy. You move amendments. You don't amend line 44 of the budget; you move an amendment that will impact on that policy and it may be confidence.
Those experts from the OECD may not understand the Westminster model and how supply is crafted. The crown will ask for your agreement before it takes your cows to feed its soldiers—it's that basic. How many cows it takes and how many soldiers it feeds may vary according to whether we're at war or not. That's a policy statement.