Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thank you to both of our witnesses for coming.
I have a fairly good understanding of how the process works, because of my having been in cabinet before. I also know where the power resides in terms of monitoring the spending, which is Treasury Board, of course. But before that, the Department of Finance has a tremendous amount of power in terms of what goes in the budget, together obviously with the Minister of Finance. The Department of Finance also over time, I've noticed, has tended to mentor people from the finance department who then have gone and worked in other departments.
So I have a question. Does the Department of Finance have individuals in the different departments—because I know you have all kinds of people who have worked in finance before—who, because of their understanding of the Department of Finance and so on, have been actually mandated to do a proper, segregated analysis on programs before they even start going to the cabinet process?