There are two points here. First and foremost, you set up a capital vote for a reason. You want to set a certain ceiling to the amount of capital expenditures you want to have incurred for a particular entity. If there is to be a change, I believe there is a process you can follow through the estimates process. They will rectify that in a supplementary estimate to adjust it so they can move money between votes. But it is a decided exercise, because Parliament will have voted on it in the first instance, and it's not a trivial matter to try to adjust it. So it does require a fair bit of work behind the scenes from the public service to make sure it gets corrected if there is a need for a change.
Second, if you see fit to put in some kind of capital ceiling, you want to know that the capital expenditures are flowing through that. Right now the mechanism is set up in such a way that there is inconsistency in practice, and some major expenditures can flow through the minor capital.
We're not suggesting any element of wrongdoing; it's just the way the system is set up. It's not conducive to your oversight, if you choose to exercise that oversight. So in what's before you, it is not necessarily easy for you to see that various capital expenditures are falling below the limit you've set out for that department or agency.
We suggest that perhaps it's time to take a look at how they actually set up those votes, who should get capital votes, and who shouldn't. Right now there's a $5-million limit, but at the end of the day, by the time you do financial reporting you see that there are patterns of departments that will be exceeding the $5 million, but they didn't get a capital vote in the first place, so no separate ceiling was set up for capital expenditures, and then everything is flowing through capital.
There are a few things in the system itself, in the framework, but there are also parameters they use that perhaps would be helpful if the government could take a look at it. Our understanding is that the government is in agreement and said they would take a look at that framework in the coming year.