I'll think about the whole cycle.
I've mentioned the budget already, which is your starting point. It's a planning document for the whole of government. You have that followed by the estimates, which is what Parliament is being asked to vote on for departments. That gives you the cash resources for each department. We accompany those with each department's report on plans and priorities, which is their annual planning document. Those documents are followed up with actual documents. That's a tenet of our system: a planning document followed by an actual document. The actuals would be the departmental performance reports on a department-by-department basis.
You have the public accounts, which this committee is very familiar with. Then through the year you have something called the “Fiscal Monitor”, which the Department of Finance produces on a monthly basis. That gives the whole-of-government financial results, and a few years ago that was supplemented by these quarterly financial reports that are done on an appropriation basis.
The one other thing I should add, Mr. Chair, is that since the advent of quarterly financial reports, there has been a database that the Treasury Board Secretariat produces. It contains much of the same information as is contained in the quarterlies, but also some other statistics. That's updated every quarter. It's open to the public. You can get spending data, appropriation data, and a number of personnel data. What you don't have is the narrative, but you have all the data there. That has come along since these quarterly financial reports were legislated.