Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, Mr. Stilborn, for coming in today.
I think you mentioned a few times that there have been quite a few witnesses here with similar points of view. I'll say also that it's been refreshing to work on this committee, in the sense that there's a lot of agreement on both sides of the committee, the government side and the opposition side; we both have a desire to inject more transparency and openness and accountability, maybe for different reasons. There's motivation, say, on the opposition side to look at exposing the government. I think on our side there's a desire to hold the bureaucracy, deputy ministers and so on, to account. Ultimately, these lead to the same objectives of having more effective government.
I just wanted to talk about one issue around the timing of the budget in this Westminster system. One of the challenges, of course, is minority parliaments. If we tried to always have a budget in lockstep with the main estimates, when you look at the Canadian Parliament in the 21st century, which has governments falling on a budget practically every other year, you wouldn't be able to actually have a budget that could then be tied to the main estimates. Do you see that as a major challenge?
As I think you were saying, the Westminster system isn't perfect, but to paraphrase Winston Churchill, democracy is a terrible system, but it's better than all the others. Therefore, maybe this committee shouldn't focus so much on the timing of the budget and on trying to reconcile that with the main estimates, just because this inherent challenge would mean that in some years the budget would just not get passed.