It is hard to look into someone else's mind, but I do not agree with some of the overlays that we are now having with respect to capital spending.
At the risk of repetition, I'll say that the way the public accounting standards currently followed in Canada handle capital makes all kinds of sense. The federal government has adhered to it over the years. The Auditor General has given a clean opinion on the federal government's public accounts for those reasons. I think it makes a lot of sense to just continue to use that framework, because it's the one that, as my colleague emphasized already, is most consciously directed to figuring out what the government's capacity is to deliver services. Is it improving, or is it not improving? To have a separate budget for capital that adds and subtracts things that the public accounts already integrate so well seems to me to be a distraction.
