Thank you, Chair.
Thank you, gentlemen, for coming today. It's a very informative presentation, and I appreciate that you've been spending many years thinking about this.
We are hearing a lot about moving from the aggregate sort of voting system that we have to more of a program system. My view of the Auditor General is that those are performance audits, not financial accounting audits, because it's not just whether this invoice matches this dollar amount, and it's put in the proper ledger and all that sort of thing. It's about how those programs are actually performing. It will be an interesting discussion about what we do with the actual votes on the financial piece on these if we do move to looking at the program side.
Right now, when we do estimates, we deal with basically the minister and the bureaucrats who report to the minister from that particular department. You're looking at whether parliamentarians should look at programs. Does that open the door that it's not just a financial audit on the program that we're spending x dollars on, that all the invoices match up and that money's going out the door, but you can tell, say, if it's wasted? It's the actual results, the performance of it. I'm assuming you're assuming that we would be looking at that.
What is the role of the individuals who are the recipients of the program? I don't think there's a program in the world, and I've tried it at the municipal level, where there isn't somebody who benefits from it, regardless of what it costs. What is your vision? If we're looking at programs, what kind of an audit or performance evaluation is that? What roles do all the players play?