Madam Speaker, I enjoyed the talk from the hon. member about the new expenditure management system. I think there are, at least potentially, some innovative and good ideas from the government. It remains to be seen how that will be played out in the actual budgetary process. At least on paper there seems to be
some hope and optimism for improvement of the budgetary management system. For that we should all be grateful.
I am wondering if the member would comment on what we are doing tonight, working late on the estimates. It seems to me one other improvement to the system could be that instead of voting on the whole sum of the estimates, to vote on a reduction in the estimates. In other words, if we wanted to reduce the estimate by a million dollars, we vote on the reduction rather than voting on the whole block sum, which means we either have zero expenditures or the entire sum the minister would like.
I wonder if he thinks the estimates procedure would have more validity with the Canadian public by allowing some input at the end of the process instead of only at the beginning of the budgetary expenditure process he talked about. Does he think that is a good idea?