No, that was my question, though. My question was clearly whether or not this was a decision made based on a business case presented by Shared Services Canada.
Now, it is true that the government could have decided to provide an extra $56 million in order to reward SSC for failing to meet its deadline, but if we had done that, imagine the moral hazard, as economists call it. You'd be sending the signal out to the entire government of Canada that if you miss your deadlines and as a result go over budget, don't worry; you'll still get your $56 million. That would be exactly the wrong way to go, and I can't imagine that we as a parliamentary committee, which is supposed to protect the public purse, would take the position that government agencies and bodies should be rewarded with extra money when they miss their timelines, because ultimately, that's what we would have been saying if we had injected that extra $56 million.
Now, I would point out that this was not a decision by a political actor suddenly in 2015-16 to cut the budget by $56 million. This was simply implementing the plan that Shared Services Canada came to Treasury Board with in its own submission three years earlier.
My question then for Shared Services, if anyone wants to explain this, is this: when you made the submission and you said in your submission that you would save $56 million, did you mean it?