What occurred here would certainly not be a practice that anybody here should endorse as good accounting. I find it an exotic and extreme way of trying to deal with something.
Somebody really didn't want to come back to the House of Commons on supplementary estimates. Mr. Wiersema said it was political considerations. This was in the charged atmosphere of the sponsorship program, and I know what happened the year before. The government couldn't even get their backbenchers to agree to supplementary estimates for the firearms registry.
There was an elaborate strategy going on to make sure that Parliament was locked out of this arrangement. We even went to the extent of getting some lawyer to give us some cover so that we could find some exotic third way of getting rid of this problem, with some creative accounting, but which no accountant in his or her right mind would say is an acceptable accounting practice.