In my opinion, this situation puts you in a very uncomfortable and difficult collective position. The government is asking you to approve funding for almost the entire year, when we still don't know what happened last year.
We have an idea, but we don't have the final deficit figures for fiscal 2023‑24, which ended on March 31. It's now December, and we still don't know. We don't have performance indicators for departments and agencies.
However, these organizations are collectively asking you for billions or tens of billions of dollars. In my opinion, this is not really the way to ensure sound management of public funds.
There are some fairly simple ways of resolving this situation. One is to compel the government, by legislation, to table the public accounts of Canada by September 30. The government is perfectly capable of doing this. Provincial governments with fewer resources are capable of doing it, and other jurisdictions are capable of doing it year after year. All it takes is the will to take away the government's discretion to table the public accounts of Canada when it suits them.