Mr. Chair, the change was made pursuant to a change or a new accounting standard issued by the Public Sector Accounting Board. The Public Sector Accounting Board is an independent standard-setter for governments in Canada. The stated accounting policies of the federal government are based on those standards.
What that standard was trying to reflect or does reflect is that not all so-called tax expenditures have similar characteristics and purposes. As I said in my opening statement, some are effectively almost like a substitute for a cheque. They are a transfer that happens to be administered through the tax system. Others are effectively rate reductions; the term I used earlier was tax concession.
What the standard did was start to differentiate between those two kinds of tax expenditures. So for the former one, where the characteristics were very similar to a cash transfer, we now show them as if they were a cash transfer. For the ones that are more reflective of a rate reduction, we show them as we always have, as an offset to tax revenue.
The impact of that change is to....because things that were formerly deducted from revenue are now shown gross—so you see an increase in tax revenue with a corresponding increase in the expenditure—the net effect is zero. That's why I mentioned that there is no impact on the bottom line, but it shows more faithfully the nature of the underlying activity.