To respond to that, as you know, the accounting standards evolve quite radically. They're still going to evolve pretty radically in the next few years. The private sector in Canada will be adopting the IFRS, which is the international financial reporting standard, in 2011. It is a brand-new standard. The rest of the world goes in a gap for the moment, but many organizations are moving on that basis.
In the federal government, we have an accrual basis of accounting for financial reporting, but for the estimates we have a modified cash basis. That's something we still need to resolve. I think your colleagues in the other committee will be coming out with recommendations on this.
Some of those accounting standards are sometimes difficult to reconcile, and I can give you a perfect example of this: the new accounting standard on reporting entity. This year, we included the four foundations and a fifth element, the St. Lawrence, as part of the accounting entity of the Government of Canada. The accounting standard tells us that if there's an accounting control, we have to put it in. We've seen one interesting debate with the Canadian Forces Personnel Service Board. The accounting standard tells us that we need to put this in the accounting entity, but when you look at the legislation, it tells us it's not public money and we cannot put it in the public accounts.
Things like that will happen. What's important is that when they do happen, we raise the flag, haul the external auditors in, say we have a problem here, and do things transparently. I just want to make sure that we do not create an automatism that might be going against what the legislators would like to do.