As I said two weeks ago, we thank the Auditor General for her 10 years of service to Canadians.
The first chapter contains a recommendation to the Treasury Board Secretariat to review the reporting practices so that Parliament is better informed of the total costs of interdepartmental measures.
In accordance with the Auditor General's recommendation, I asked my colleagues to review the government's reporting practices in order to establish greater clarity when it comes to the horizontal initiatives, for example.
It's important to understand that these procedures have been around for 99 years, I'm told. The roll-up procedure, for instance, that was used to report the G-8 legacy fund used a process that has been around for nearly a hundred years. That's not to excuse, but to inform you as to why a particular process was used at the time by the minister of infrastructure.
Minister Baird and I have concluded, quite rightly, that the Auditor General was correct, that this procedure in these kinds of circumstances does not meet our test, our high standards for being transparent to Parliament. The Auditor General has indicated that this was not a deliberate malicious act by myself or by Minister Baird, but there was room for improvement. We have taken that to heart and I have given, as I mentioned, instructions to the secretary that we will come up with a new procedure for similar situations so that there can be a greater transparency and accountability to Parliament.