Thank you.
Maybe I'll just pick up from that, Sheila, if that's all right, because indeed if you look at the major transfer that you referred to, the social transfer, what we look at when we're managing transfers is that obviously it's a shared priority area. We know provinces are spending enormous amounts on health care and on certain elements of post-secondary education and social transfers, so we know we are only providing a portion of what they spend on it. There is no question, provincial governments are spending the equivalent of multiples of the money we transfer to them on the social side. That's why it comes back to the central point, which is that these are common priorities but the provincial governments are accountable to their electorates for proper spending. All the accountability functions of that process work.
Clearly, when we look at...how often do we renew these programs? Every five years we take stock of the overall effectiveness. Can we be more efficient in the transfers? Do we have the right outcomes there? There is a good discussion of accountability mechanisms at that time, but the core message there is that we provide substantial amounts of funds for common priorities, the provinces use it, and they are accountable for the overall spending. They don't segment and track the portion from the federal government for that purpose. I think that has worked well in Canada.
On the trust fund, the ecoTrust or the other trusts that have been put in place, a more recent trust, as I mentioned.... It's an area that comes into effect if there is an unanticipated surplus or some flexibility at the end of a fiscal year that we didn't anticipate. It's always a choice of whether to apply that to some debt reduction or to alternative approaches to spending. If you have some assurance over the long term, you can provide some long-term program spending. But in the recent past, since 1999, as the Auditor General mentioned, there have been a number of occasions when the government said, “This is an important, immediate priority for the federal government that is shared with the provincial government; we will come to an understanding of what we're trying to achieve collectively; the province will commit to doing something in that trust agreement and say so publicly before the end of that fiscal year, in which case we will transfer the funding for them for that common purpose.” A similar accountability would be expected as to the transfer you just referred to, on the social transfer, for example.