Thank you for the question.
We hope that it will improve things. A document like this is interesting for anyone involved in the areas of finance and accounting. We do hope that it will improve understanding for parliamentarians. Do not forget that we do not work for the departments, we work for parliamentarians. This document is a good example of something that can help parliamentarians to better grasp the difficulties that they have to resolve when they are looking at the budget process.
As Mr. Askari mentioned, it is not just a question of examining the budget process from the figures that you see in the main estimates or the budget. It is also important to clarify all the steps. It starts somewhere, meaning that an amount that appears in the main estimates has first been argued over in cabinet, then in the Department of Finance and the Treasury Board, not to mention in the approval stage.
In fact, we can see that amounts mentioned in the federal budget do not necessarily appear in the main estimates. They may only appear in the supplementary estimates. We have given the committee some examples. It gives you an overview of the difficulty for the Treasury Board and the time that approving some budgets can take. Infrastructure programs are good examples of programs that can require a lot of time.