In terms of unfunded liabilities, I guess the term “funded” really means that an appropriate level of assets have been set aside to pay for a particular liability, particularly in the pension plan. You figure out the value of all the promises owed, and then how much has been set aside in the pension plan assets to deal with that.
In terms of other liabilities, you could argue that probably all of them are unfunded because, by definition, they haven't been paid and they're going to have to be paid out of the cash, and there's been no specific funding set aside to pay for them. There may be some other exceptions to that. Fundamentally, they are going to be paid in the future. Unfunded liabilities are simply just the result of accrual accounting. You record the things that you haven't yet paid for or you haven't yet received because the underlying transactions have already happened.
In terms of the authority question, if I understand it appropriately, that maybe goes back to my example of something like the amortization, where there would need to be.... When the estimates are put together.... Again, the way we handled this in New Brunswick was amortization was in a separate vote all on its own. The individual departments were listed by how much amortization we thought was going to be recorded in the individual departments. Amortization was voted for the government as a whole as one vote. The reason for that was it meant that if the department underspent their amortization, if an asset wasn't built so the amortization wasn't as high as they originally expected it to be, they couldn't then transfer that money to something else and spend it on grants or contracts to somebody, or something like that. If they wanted to do that outside of the vote that they got for ordinary funding, they would have to go and get a supplementary appropriation.
In terms of how the committee deals with those types of things, just making sure there's the appropriate controls through the voting mechanism on the different accrual aspects of it would be what you'd need to do.