Mr. Speaker, nothing could be further from the truth. My understanding of the process in the spending of government money is that there is the application process, the negotiation process, the due diligence process, and at some point in time there is the contract, for example, to spend $1 million on the Ottawa sewer system. Once the contract is signed, the work is done. The public servants have done a lot of work leading up to that, but once the contract is signed, all they have to do is go to the website and indicate that they have just approved $1 million for the Ottawa sewer system, push the send button and it is done. It might take four or six seconds or somewhere in between. All the work is done in the due diligence process. I agree that it does take some time, but to file it with Parliament immediately, we are talking seconds.
In the House of Commons on March 24th, 2009. See this statement in context.