If I may, Mr. Chair, we did not want the intent of putting forward the funding request to be the responsibility of the Treasury Board Secretariat, because the funding requests and the accountabilities for the expenditure of those funds do rest with each organization and the minister responsible for that. That's what we meant by that.
We can give direction, we are giving direction, and we are working with organizations. But on the specific requests for funding, for example, we worked very closely with the renewal of the pension systems that are with Public Works and Government Services, National Defence, and the RCMP. We as a secretariat worked very closely with those organizations to ensure that there was a coordinated approach, a common platform, and we did not end up with three disparate systems that could not communicate with each other.
We did that, but their specific requests for funding were each put forward by the respective ministers, because the delivery of those initiatives rests with those respective organizations. That's all we meant by that. We did not carry the funding requests, nor do we intend to carry those funding requests. We help shape, coordinate, and support. We play our challenge function and make sure that the funding requests are reasonable and the priorities are clear, but we do not carry the responsibility for taking those requests and for receiving the funds.
So that's all we meant by that. There is a divided responsibility, for obvious reasons, for the accountability for the expenditure of funds.