Thank you very much for having us at the meeting today. We hope that our questions and responses will be helpful to you in your work.
We look forward to your questions. To provide some context for our possible responses, we have some opening remarks about the motives and main themes of the C.D. Howe Institute's annual fiscal accountability report card.
At a high level, our report tries to capture in a letter grade the extent to which government budgets, estimates and public accounts help elected representatives and voters understand governments' capacities to deliver services, and how plans and events during a year will enhance or degrade that capacity.
The way we have divided this is that I get to start with some compliments, and my colleague Nick will pick up with some complaints.
On the positive side, I'm glad to say that Canada's senior governments have tended to provide better information over time, thanks to the establishment of public sector accounting standards, the improvement of public sector accounting standards over time and closer adherence to public sector accounting standards over time. The federal government has often led those improvements.
However, gaps remain, and backsliding is a constant threat. We have too many instances of information that is hard to find, obscure or even misleading and late. The federal public accounts generally get good scores in our report card, but we would like the federal government—the most economically important government in the country and the one whose fiscal practices affect all Canadians most strongly—to be at the head of the class.
I will now turn it over to my colleague Nick for some comments on what needs to happen. Thank you.