Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I also want to thank the representatives for being here today, particularly for your great presentations. It helps with our first time on this committee.
I'll just start off with my first question. It goes to page 7 and page 9 in the presentation deck you have. They talk about our total program expenses as we moved from 2006-07 and 2007-08. Actually, those expenses have gone up $11.2 billion. If you go to page 9, the transfers to other levels of government represent a higher percentage in 2006-07 and higher than that in 2007-08.
I want to thank our chair, Mr. Murphy, for raising the question, because I think it is a significant one. First, could you make comments on the transfer of those expenses with respect to the concern about the trust funds to which most transfers were made? In Budget 2009 we have taken the appropriation of specific funds to transfer payments rather than to trust funds.
I'll be honest with you, when I first read it, the names were misleading. When you hear “trust fund”, you tend to think that there are funds put in trust that actually will be accountable. But it's quite the opposite. So I'm wondering if you could comment on that.
Second, I'm going back to the comments you made, Mr. Monette, regarding the building of systems that are so complex. Who's responsible for wanting to initiate those complex systems? The reality is that we in our constituencies need to be able to understand a little bit about how to explain the accounting process to our constituents. If we have accountants who can't explain it, then I'm wondering why we aren't...? I mean, all kinds of businesses use accrual methods that are accepted and go through audits for CRA that are well accepted and easy to understand. Why are we so persistent, it seems, in building systems that are so complex that nobody can actually understand them? If you're going to have trouble wrapping your minds around them, then I think you've left 98% of the people who are even in the business out of it.
I'm just sort of wondering how we get past that, because we're going to be criticized for building a bureaucracy that is so deep and complex. That's what we battle. People say you're building this big bureaucracy to keep it complex so nobody understands it but them. We need you to help us get away from that for your benefit and ours. How do we remedy that?