Thank you.
It's always difficult in these situations to assess cost versus benefit, because typically, cost is very easy to quantify, and benefits are more qualitative, so they're often difficult to quantify. However, I believe that the benefits do outweigh them, and certainly, when we've looked at the practices in other jurisdictions, this is really a best practice.
I must say that we both worked in public sector accounting in Canada for quite a long time, and actually, Canada globally is a world leader. Certainly the federal government and the provinces are far ahead of many other countries in the world, and we are a world leader in terms of best practice. This is the last piece of that best practice that is just not there yet that would take it one notch up toward completing the cycle and completing the circle.
In terms of training and transition costs, there would certainly be costs. Any time there's a change, then those costs would have to be counted and they would have to be planned for. I would fully support the comment that there will be a transition period and that it may be quite lengthy to get all of those processes into place. We don't have the expertise here to know exactly what that would be.
We haven't done all of the research with all of the other governments, but I would submit that, when you see the number of other governments that are already doing this and have seen the benefits in terms of performance management and managing all of the other resources, they have seen the value of this. They haven't turned back, in other words. If you look at the research, it does support this, but it's always difficult to quantify benefits. It's always easier to set out the costs.