Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I would also like to thank the President of the Treasury Board for spending some time with us today.
The Auditor General, the Parliamentary Budget Officer and other agencies have recently and in the past few years stressed that the process for reviewing estimates was still and had always been a problem. You might say that every year there's a new way of counting money. As part of the budget, it's difficult to compare the main expenditures from one year over another, even for the Main Estimates. We are always told that it's in the supplementary estimates where we'll see the difference. But it's difficult to have an overall view and compare apples to apples. It's more like we're comparing apples to oranges. It's difficult to retrace the money, check whether it really was spent and where, if necessary, and if it was spent wisely.
You've been in possession of the Auditor General's findings for several months now. She recommended that the way the estimates are written be changed to make them clearer and more uniform so that we can do our job as parliamentarians properly.
I would like begin by finding out what measures you took in the wake of the Auditor General's recommendations in that respect.