Mr. Chair, the premise is that a lot of the information is out there already. That's absolutely true. Information on programs is included in the estimates for information purposes. It does not get a lot of attention, simply because the vote, which is actually key for spending money, is on capital, operating, and grants and contributions, but the information is out there right now.
To be frank, because it's for information purposes, departments do their best to estimate what they might spend against a given program. When you're into dividing people's salaries across programs, estimates are involved, and that's okay.
When you think about our vote structure, given that it's illegal to overspend your votes, it's a key control we have over departments in terms of managing government spending. They manage their vote structure quite aggressively, because it's against the law to overspend money allocated to a particular vote. All of our controls in our financial systems, at the departmental level, are based on the current structure.
Moving to a program-type vote of some sort would entail changing all the controls in the departmental systems, which would be a big effort, because each department has its own financial system. At the same time, we'd want to make sure that the estimates of what departments think they will spend against a particular program were more rigorous, because Parliament would actually be voting on that money. Right now, departments do their best to actually estimate what they will spend, but it's for information purposes. We'd need to give departments time to make sure they improve the rigour around those estimates.
Second, maybe take a look at their program structure and ask, given that Parliament wants to vote on the structure, whether this still makes sense.
That's more or less where the work would be. The big cost is around the systems cost to actually change our control structure.