Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. We will open the 39th meeting of the Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates.
Welcome back, everyone, from your two-week sojourn.
We're going to continue the examination of the estimates process. We welcome two substitute members for the NDP today. I should inform you that there will be changes to the permanent members of the committee. That won't be happening today. We'll be introducing folks later on.
Today as witnesses we have Mr. Alex Lakroni, chief financial officer of the Department of Public Works and Government Services; and Diane Hall, manager for estimates. We thank them for appearing.
We've asked Mr. Lakroni specifically to give us a tutorial and walk us through the process as he sees it. I think we would all benefit from that, especially at this stage of the examination as we are all a little bit better versed in matters of the budget cycle. I think we would benefit from hearing again from Mr. Lakroni. We've asked him to give us a presentation of about 20 minutes and then we can either go to the traditional rounds of questioning or, if we choose to, we can just go to questions as they come up.
Is it the will of the committee to continue with the normal five minutes per party or, given the limited amount of time we'll have left, would you rather just have a free go-round of questions?