Government Operations committee  The money is actually treated as taxable income. The money you're seeing here is pre-tax.

Government Operations committee  It would in two places. If you look to the public accounts, the liability is booked, so you're doing accrual accounting. The accrual part of this is the $6 billion liability that's already hit the surplus/deficit of the government over the years. That's the accrual piece. We do appropriations on a cash basis, which is what the question relates to.

Government Operations committee  You would have seen it when we booked the liability over the years, gradually. That's the key difference between the issues. One focuses on cash, so we're asking for permission to spend $850 million in cash. With the other model, you would have seen a gradual 2% a year on our payroll build up.

Government Operations committee  Sure. Thank you for the question. I'll speak to the funding for AECL in two pieces. As the member mentioned, funding was provided through government contingencies. When the deal to divest the division of CANDU reactors from the Government of Canada to SNC-Lavalin was struck, the funding structure for AECL changed.

Government Operations committee  Thank you for the question, Mr. Chair. We've made a couple of changes. I'll use this opportunity to highlight the changes we've made to the supplementary estimates (A). The member has just mentioned one of them. We've put those online. They're not removed from the document itself, but we are trying to keep printing costs down, so we've put a number of things online.

Government Operations committee  Mr. Chair, they are around the fact that the benefit is no longer accumulated. There is a stopping of the benefit you've earned. You can get payment now or later, but you are no longer earning a benefit on a go-forward basis. So you're not adding to your benefits as you go. That's where the savings are.

Government Operations committee  Thank you for the question. Once we do finish the negotiations with all collective agreements, there will be annual savings of about $500 million a year, roughly speaking, with the elimination of this benefit. As I did mention, we will see payouts over a number of years. To give you an example in terms of the benefit for the Canadian Forces, that has ceased, but it will likely be next fiscal year when Canadian Forces members receive the option to receive payout.

Government Operations committee  The mains are typically more for ongoing programs. With the supplementary estimates, we did want to have a good estimate of the cash we would require. It very much is dependent, as I said earlier, upon the pace of negotiations. We wanted the most current estimate we could get.

Government Operations committee  Thank you for the question, Mr. Chair. The $6 billion was the amount that accumulated since the severance benefit was put in place. That is a period of time that varies, depending upon the collective agreements, but you're looking over roughly 30 years or so. It did get added into, as I mentioned, some 27 collective agreements, plus other groups as well.

Government Operations committee  If people leave voluntarily, if the agreement has already been renegotiated, they may have already opted to receive part of that payment. If they have not received that payment, when they depart next year or the year after they will then get that amount, yes. Some people may have already taken it last year.

Government Operations committee  Thank you for your question. The money we're speaking about here in terms of severance is not related to departures. As the chief financial officer for the Treasury Board Secretariat said in her opening remarks, this relates to the elimination of accumulation of severance for voluntary departures.

Government Operations committee  What you have in the core federal public service is roughly 278,000. If you add in the RCMP and National Defence on top of that, you get grosso modo about 400,000. Many of the agreements have already been negotiated, so we again are dealing with an estimate, but it's roughly based on those numbers.

Government Operations committee  There are the main estimates, and in the last few years we've had supplementary estimates (A), (B), and (C). If you went back further you would see that in some years there were only two, so it was (A) and (B). Sorry, I may have misunderstood the question, parts I, II and III of the estimates....

Government Operations committee  It would depend on the nature of the recommendation. On accrual versus cash, you're actually voting money to dollars, so I wouldn't recommend a pilot on that one. If you wanted to change the way you studied something, a pilot is absolutely a possibility.

Government Operations committee  Where a member of Parliament has a question specific to a departmental spending profile, the best way to approach it is to work through the department itself. What you see in the main estimates for Agriculture Canada is as a result of their submission of material into the centre.