Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I think I should also commend the whole chain of command who have participated in the production of these public accounts. It's a massive undertaking; it has the seal of approval of the Auditor General, and I think that's tremendous.
Having said that, it's a two- or three-inch thickness of documents that detail the expenditure of more than a couple of hundred billions of dollars, so there's a lot of territory.
The fiscal year we're talking about ended more than half a year ago, so I note, as a highlight before I ask my questions, that the government managed to walk us into a deficit before the recession really started to bite. I could say that it's only $5 billion or $6 billion, but it's still a deficit, which may have been unexpected by a lot of Canadians.
In any event, one of the highlights of this, from my point of view, is the quantity of the lapsing, the money not spent in the fiscal year in which it had been planned to spend the money. The amount of lapsing is in the billions—maybe $5 billion, $6 billion, $7 billion, as I and my researchers have added it up—and I'm puzzled by that. I know that lapsing happens, and for a number of reasons, including administrative. I suppose when you're spending $230 billion-odd, you can have a hiccup and you don't get the money out the front door. But some of the lapsing here is in relation to programming that I would have thought the government and Canadians wanted spent, wanted to have out there.
I'm going to direct my question to the Comptroller General. He may not feel equipped to answer it, but I'm wondering whether there is any kind of pattern of lapsing visible here. For example, the language instruction for newcomers under Citizenship shows a 32% lapse of about $82 million; the apprenticeship incentive grant at HRSDC, a lapse of 46%, about $45 million; in the enabling accessibility fund—this is for Canadians who need accessibility—there's a lapse of 100%: the full $21 million of the program was not spent. The government talks the talk on the crime agenda, and yet when it comes to crime prevention, the crime prevention budget of $46 million left $12 million unspent. Grants in support of safer communities was 87% lapsed, with $5 million or $6 million unspent.
Let me ask the Comptroller General whether he has noted either an increase or a decrease in the incidence of lapsing, and what may be causing it. This programming is important. The stuff I just read through is important to many Canadians, and if anything, it ought to be torqued, but surely not lapsed.