Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you for coming in, once again, and also for your contributions during the committee's study.
You know, I did a bit of scorekeeping on the recommendations. There were 16.
It looks like there are seven that you agree with outright and six that you tacitly agree with, even though it's not under your purview but under the House of Commons. I see 13, then, that you agree with.
There are two that you disagree with: the fiscal year and the tax expenditures recommendation.
One you neither agree with nor disagree with, and that's the role of the Parliamentary Budget Officer.
I want to focus on the ones that you disagree with right now. In terms of the fixed budget date, I understand the challenge. The other option we looked at was changing the fiscal year—taking this whole machinery of government, which has been in place since 1867, and having a fiscal year that starts April 1.
The challenge we have is that since things were changed in 1968...apparently it was just one committee of supply that looked at all the estimates. Then it was split up into various committees to study the various estimates. However, the main estimates that get studied don't contain any budget items. So it's a frustration, when you ask a question about a recently introduced budget item, typically in March, and then you actually ask questions about the main estimates, and the answer is, well, none of those items are in the main estimates.
Is changing the fiscal year something that should be explored further, in your opinion—to perhaps July 1, let's say—so that the main estimates would reflect some of the items from the budget?