Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I think it's important to distinguish between accrual-based accounting, accrual-based budgeting and appropriations, and the issue of trying to make the best long-term economic decision around acquiring certain accommodations, which is the job of the real property sector in Public Works and Government Services Canada.
Certainly the extent to which we introduce accrual information in the entire budgeting and expenditure cycle biases decisions towards longer-term thinking, which I think supports what Public Works and Government Services Canada is doing in a general sense.
That said, the economic analysis they do does not really involve a lot of accrual accounting. They may be able to tell you more about how they do their economic analysis, but it's more of a life-cycle costing that they do. Over the life cycle of a building, the difference between accrual accounting and cash-based or near-cash-based accounting is not significant. The question of economics becomes more a question of cashflows.
When the decision has to be made as to what approach is to be taken in a specific time period--a specific year, today, tomorrow--other issues come into play in addition to the economic analysis. That's when things get a little bit difficult. It becomes a question of whether the budget is available in a particular appropriation to do a particular transaction, one way or another. Other things come into play on these decisions as well, as you've heard around the table here this morning.
In sum, the decisions themselves get a little more complicated than just the straight economics.