I understand the member's concern here because members often get very interested when it looks like money is being moved from capital to operating. This is a different case.
These are the carry forward amounts where Treasury Board has a central vote that it allocates out to departments to basically allow them to spend money in the current fiscal year that they didn't spend in the previous fiscal year. To do that, we have to wait until the previous year is finalized so we can see what each department spent, or more importantly didn't spend. When we finished crunching those numbers, it was clear if we added up all the five percents of departments for operating, we would exceed what was in the central vote for operating.
When we did a similar exercise for the capital, it was clear we could give each department their 20% and still not exceed the vote. There was money left, in this case about $174 million. So the decision was made to put into estimates a transfer to take the money we did not need from capital budget carry forward and move it into operating to allow departments to get their full 5% carry forward.
So this is not a case of moving money that was planned for capital and switching it to operating, which I know is a concern frequently of members. It is because of the size of the unspent money in fiscal year 2012-13. We did bump into a bit of an unusual circumstance.
I will also say, though, if you looked at government spending over the years, it has gone back down, but it's up over where it was 10 years ago. The amount we have put aside for operating budget carry forward has not really been increased in many years. So we never increased the ceiling of operating budget carry forward to properly allow for the growth in government spending, so this was a bit of a one-time catch-up adjustment.