I strongly agree that the estimates need an anchor, and that anchor should be the budget. The budget sets out the overall economic and fiscal policy of the government, and the estimates support that fiscal policy that the government has set out. Some new spending proposals have their own legislation, either through the budget implementation bill or through separate legislation on their own, but the majority of the initiatives that are included in the budget go through the estimates process. Without knowing what the budget contains, it's very difficult then to vote on a set of estimates, which have no relevance to the budget.
I've always been a strong believer that the budget should be tabled first. That's the way it had been for most of the period up to 2006. Some study had been done on the reasons I cited for continued interim reports, where there was a logical order as to how things should flow. Right now when you take a look at the estimates, their anchor is last fall's economic and fiscal update, so all the statutory program spending numbers are out of date, and a lot of things that have happened in the budget are not included in the estimates per se.
If you're going to study the estimates, the estimates are a very highly aggregated type of number, you need another document to provide you with the details. That document should be the reports on plans and priorities. I'm not saying that document should be the same as today; I think it needs a major overhaul. I felt the document that Martin talked about before, called part IIIs, had a lot more relevant information in it than what the reports on plans and priorities have today.