I appreciate it, Chair. Thank you very much.
Minister, thank you for appearing today. I want to go to the subject of vote 40 and recognize the work of Mr. Blaikie in highlighting this issue during the main estimates.
Parliament did authorize $7 billion, but in what we have before us we can see that about $2.7 billion has been spent, leaving $4.3 billion unspent. One of the chief reasons that we heard from your government for this vote 40 was that you wanted to authorize the spending so it could be used as soon as possible once the plans were ready and a Treasury Board submission was complete.
We see in the supplementary estimates (A) that you're not even close to allocating all the money. These items that have been allocated since the main estimates, couldn't they have come under the supplementary estimates through the Treasury Board submissions process so that we parliamentarians could have had better oversight and better-informed authorization of where the money is actually going?