Thank you. I think I counted about four questions there.
Let me start with the accountability versus the accounting issue. Those are two different things. Accountability is a relationship set up by, in this case, someone providing funds and someone using funds. How that relationship is understood, either formally through terms and conditions or informally through practice, history, and agreement, will determine how the recipient views the transaction and how they treat the transaction. Then accounting comes in and says, how do we account for that relationship? What has to be established first of all is what that relationship is. What was the expectation for what was to be done with that money? How is that money handled?
Part of what we're grappling with when we're dealing with transfers is that the accountability is not clear. I'm very sympathetic, speaking as a citizen, that the flexibility is needed, yet by eliminating the terms and conditions, you make it very open as to what is done with the money and how the money is reported, which leads me to my second point.
This was alluded to earlier. Rob Wright spoke to segmenting dollars and keeping them separate. We don't do that. Financial reporting is done on a summary basis. We aggregate information. It is not possible in summary financial statements to trace a dollar from the federal government and see how it was spent. That is where you need things like performance reporting, which will measure things like new homes created or greenhouse gas emissions reduced. Those are different kinds of reporting mechanisms that are needed.
As I said, we don't get into policy. I can understand that there's a concern about the accounting, but the accounting has to reflect the substance of what has taken place.
As far as where we go with the government transfers, we will not wait for unanimity, but we must come to some level of consensus. There is a standard currently existing. We are striving to provide a standard that is an improvement on what we have, but we have to have some level of consensus because that is how we operate.