I'll take a stab at a response.
The suggestion that this is a culture that's resistant to change reflects some of the complexity of the environment. It's a big operation, with 135 appropriation-dependent departments, cabinet committees, the executive, the legislative branch.
The reality from where I sit is that there have been a number of innovations over the last number of years that respond to calls for increased transparency, accountability, and reporting.
In the mid-1990s, coming out of program review and the significant changes related to government programs, there was a multi-stakeholder approach to revising the main estimates, and that saw the estimates separated into main estimates and the RPP-DPR process, with an emphasis on planning and then reporting back against what was achieved.
Once we put planning documents in the public domain, it created a call for better structures around which to plan, and we're seeing that debate play out now in whether you want to control by vote or program activity. There's clearly an interest to planning by program activity and controlling by that. The work that TBS has done over the last number of years on the MRRS and program activity structure responds to that ongoing demand for change and better information.
I also mentioned the introduction to the expenditure cycle of new supplementary estimates documents, the supplementary estimates A in the spring. One of the constraints that we work under is that Parliament has three supply periods. You vote on appropriations three times during the year. We took the step of introducing a supplementary appropriation for each of those three supply periods.
Finally, with respect to timing and alignment of the budget and main estimates, which is an ongoing challenge, Mr. Matthews mentioned the innovations coming out of budget 2009 and the call for timely stimulus. This was the earliest budget in many, many years. It was on January 27. That was the budget. It forecast what the government wanted to do to stimulate Canada's economy and respond to the global recession. In order to make that work, there was a very innovative measure in the main estimates known as the budget implementation vote. That required that Parliament effectively delegate to Treasury Board ministers the ability to make appropriations and get money into the hands of departments in a timely way.