The first point to make--I know I made this point last time, and I'm going to make it again--is that we are in this discussion treating the audit of the consolidated financial statements of the Government of Canada as if there was virtually no benefit, and that we had to therefore supplement that with these departmental statements.
I would vehemently deny that. I think the audit of the consolidated statements of the Government of Canada is tremendously valuable. It's valuable to parliamentarians, to taxpayers, and to investors, I would say. So given that tremendous value, there is one aspect.
Mr. Wiersema also then referred to the implicit value, not the opinion itself but the value that's created by the scrutiny, by the incentive to departments to improve practices and systems. But once again, I would say, that same incentive is there through the audit of the summary of financial statements of the Government of Canada.
And then on top of that, we have now added the very specific disclosures around internal controls. We have also added to departments the requirement to produce financial statements in their DPRs, which would basically look very much like they would even in the eventuality that they were audited.
With all of those building blocks in place--the audit of the consolidated statements and now these additional blocks that we've added--is there still more benefit to be had by digging even deeper through just basically lowering the materiality levels and increasing the effort by 20 times?
I would have to say that I think going that little extra mile now, given all that's been accomplished to date, would be.... I would question whether the cost benefit on that one is positive. It would be different if it weren't for all of the other things we have already accomplished, but we're now talking about adding kind of a last step on a huge foundation.