Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I think the PBO's comment was related to the government as a whole and it was wondering if Treasury Board was approving too much in terms of planned spending. I will come back to this point a few times, I think.
The amounts that departments have authority to spend is a maximum. They don't have to spend it because it's kind of the maximum, and given that it's illegal to overspend they have to plan for the best-case or worst-case scenario, depending on your perspective. If you're in the business of procuring military assets you have to ask what's the maximum that might get procured this year and make sure you have enough money to cover that off.
In fact, reality often turns out to be less than what they planned. So there's a cushion there. For me the question is not, especially with supplementary estimates (B), did we approve too much? It's more, is there good value for the money that's being spent? In that case you look to specific programs and their evaluations to say “yes there's good value there” or “no there's not”.
What I would say in terms of practice for Treasury Board going forward is this. I would pay attention to supplementary estimates (C). It comes along in the winter. It's money that goes into departments' reference levels very late in the year; you know, there's not much time left to spend it. We should really be taking a hard look at money in supplementary estimates (C) and say, “prove that you need this, prove that you can spend it this fiscal year”. So if there's one thing that we should do differently, that's what I would I say.