That's a good question.
You're right, Mr. Blanchette. There really is a trend
of amounts that have increased in terms of lapses, I would say this. You have to look at the reasons why. If you looked department by department, Infrastructure is always a heavy lapser of money. The reason is, as I said, departments cannot overspend. They have to plan for negotiating deals and all these things. In fact, they often don't negotiate as many deals as they would expect so the moneys lapse. That gets reprofiled.
National Defence is a very high lapser year after year largely because military procurement is complicated and it's often delayed. So you can ask yourself from a planning perspective: Should less money be set aside to kind of...more realistic assumptions? The other bit I will say is we have some programs that are demand-driven. For instance, Natural Resources Canada has a program where you can apply for an energy rebate if you do certain things. Well, the government is takers in that front. We make a best estimate as to what might happen. If fewer people apply than we expect, so be it. We have similar programs for insurance for agriculture. That's kind of a second theme.
The third one I would mention concerns major project delays on bridges and things like that. That can slow down spending as well. Spending is still necessary, just the profile is sometimes difficult to accurately predict.