Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I want to thank all of our witnesses for being here with us today and I want to thank you for the work that you do. You're not in easy departments. Certainly the Treasury Board Secretariat and the Department of Finance are the nerve centre of what happens financially in our country.
I want to touch base on some of the material that we've covered already this morning for a little more clarification.
The budget, admittedly, is a very comprehensive document. It is a policy document. I think you're correct, Mr. Matthews, in stating that on a number of occasions this morning. It is comprehensive. It is over 400 pages long this time around. Quite frankly, I don't see how it cannot be. We're talking about $275 billion to $280 billion worth of expenditures across a wide range of programs and departments. I find it difficult to believe that it's as short as it is, to be quite frank.
I know members of the opposition have tried to make hay out of the length of the budget, but there are high school and university students right across this country who have textbooks that are longer, with a lot of comprehensive and very difficult concepts to understand and grasp.
However, it does highlight one thing: to better understand what is in that budget and how that money eventually gets spent in our country, we need to have perhaps a clearer way of understanding it, especially the non-initiated, the people who are not in the departments that know exactly where every dollar is being spent.
You have agreed with recommendations 4, 5, and 16, which deal with information by program activity for three previous years and three future years so we can see them on a comparison basis and see what the major differences and variances are. We've talked a lot this morning about an online program that we can access so that we can see this clear picture. I know you're studying it, but can you give us a sense of some of the options you're considering?