There are two things we need to think about here. My colleague has talked about the “may” and the “shall” and how that may be interpreted.
My counsel to you is that we need to be very careful. This legislation has been gone through by experts in the area of legality, and just changing one paragraph without thinking about what it means further down the road....
With regard to the financial implications of “may” or “shall”, I'd just like to remind honourable members of the estimates process and that all estimates, whether they be the main estimates, supplementary estimates (A), supplementary estimates (B), or supplementary estimates (C), have to go through the House. They have to receive approval and they have to come to this committee. So with regard to whether it's a “may” or a “shall”, we still have to go through a main estimates process and have our amounts approved.
(Clauses 6 and 7 agreed to)