Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for raising the issue of departmental plans. This spending was not appearing in departmental plans. It undermined the study of the estimates process and was not in keeping with the procedure and practice of this place. I felt this was so serious that I raised a point of order to that effect. The Speaker ruled and I will not comment on his ruling. However, it is an important issue. Departmental plans are supposed to be the place we go to understand what government does in its spending and what it plans to do, and to hold it to account.
Departmental plans are part 3 of the estimates. They are a formal document. They are meant to provide, in a contained document, both the funding requests and what government plans to do with the money. Now, by having this central vote, we have all this other information hanging out there that parliamentarians do not see as part of the ordinary process of studying the estimates. Hence we saw a lot of confusion. Things that should have been asked at other committees were not. They were at our committee, OGGO, instead. Then we had the kind of circus of a meeting with 12 to 14 different officials from many departments trying to talk to one committee about it.
Not having this information in the departmental plans, even in the short term, has created a lot of confusion about how to study this and come to an accurate judgment about whether the numbers in the estimates make sense. In the long term, it creates a problem as well by having that information housed outside of the normal departmental plans.