Thank you very much, Chair, and thank you very much to our witnesses who are here with us today.
As a former commercial banker, what I'm seeing is the difference between the financial accounting that we need to have—the income statement, balance sheet, and so on—and what we used to look for, which was the cash flow. We wanted to know where the financing was coming from. Was it internal or were we putting through a loan?
To me, it's not that difficult to understand. I think when we're voting as parliamentarians on the appropriations, we want to know just how much cash we have to put into the system, if I'm summarizing it correctly.
I'm very interested by what our colleagues in the U.K. have said about costing, because I would never give a loan to a business owner who came to me to buy a truck or a piece of equipment without knowing how much it costs first. I might have something to say about whether I agreed with the cost, or get an independent evaluation, and so on. That makes a lot of sense to me.
What I would like to know—just following up on how you went through this transformation procedure—is what the learning curve was like for departmental officials to provide adequate costing. What was the learning curve like for the parliamentarians who were sitting on committees and who had to understand these different types of financial reporting documents?