Thank you.
Minister Miller, the PBO, in his report on the fall economic update, had some pretty scathing statements to make about the timeliness and lack of transparency on the release of the public accounts and the annual financial report. It is my understanding that the reopening and some of the stuff that happened around that from.... I'm sorry; I'm trying not to get into too much accounting lingo here on you. That happened around the $40-billion settlement that was going on at the time, and that's what triggered a lot of this, so I get the connection.
Can you tell the committee what it was about the agreements and the timing that forced you to, in an unprecedented way, reopen public accounts that were already signed off on? They were done; they were finished. They eventually got tabled later than they had since 1994, and, as I said, they had to be reopened.
Ultimately, just about $10 billion got backdated into the accounts for 2021, and the PBO makes it very clear that this was a government decision. In his report, he said, “...the Government's decision to amend the initial Public Accounts....”
As somebody who sits at the cabinet table, can you tell us how that played out and what forced you to have to do that?