Thank you, Minister Brison, for being here. I was looking at your mandate letter and you have a huge mandate to fulfill. You have 11 priorities. I know that your goal is to lead the management agenda of the government.
One of the things you talked about is transparency and accountability. I appreciate the fact that you're trying to align both the estimates and the budget process. I was looking at annex B, which talks about cash versus accrual accounting. It confuses the living daylights when your public accounts are in a cash basis and something else is in an accrual basis. While your department is looking at things around making the cycles similar, could we please look at accrual accounting because those are the international financial standards, and accountants read financial statements that way and it's easy to explain.
Treasury Board is requesting $43 million-plus for the back office transformation initiative. My question would be about your desire to make operations move toward information technology, so that data is available, open, etc.
What are some of the challenges that Treasury Board will face, or has faced, as it moves toward that back office transformation? How can we avoid the problems that Shared Services is facing, for example, where the RFP process is not very transparent sometimes or it's not very well done?
I know that within your mandate you have to work to establish new performance standards with ministries like Public Services and Procurement. The minister will be coming tomorrow.
Could you give me some idea of how you're moving toward it, what challenges we face, and how can we make the process more accountable going forward?