Thank you very much.
This is the thing. What I do find baffling, if you will, is that those allocated items, those ones that have already been to Treasury Board, and through Treasury Board, and got Treasury Board approval, could very readily have been put in the main departmental estimates.
For the other ones, they didn't have to be in the main estimates. The government normally, which they didn't do this year because all their new budget initiatives are in the mains.... Normally we would also, in tandem, be considering the supplementary estimates that would have been tabled a little bit after the budget. That would have had all the new budget initiatives the government could fit in before the beginning of the summer.
There was already a process that ensured the government could fund the budget initiatives that are approved. The only thing vote 40 really accomplishes is funding initiatives that aren't already approved. There is a mechanism. In fact, if the government wanted, they could still present supplementary estimates for all the things that have been to Treasury Board since the tabling of the main estimates. It's why when we had senior officials from Treasury Board I asked how many items had been through Treasury Board since the tabling of the mains, because if he had given us a list—that's too much to hope for I suppose—then the obvious reply there would have been all of those things could be brought in supplementary estimates and passed before the end of June. The main estimates aren't going to get passed before the end of June anyway or thereabouts, so the supplementary estimates could be passed at the same time.