Government Operations committee  I'll try to get into this in as much detail as I can, and perhaps that may generate a second question from you. First of all, this Global Transportation Hub, as you noted, is an intermodal transportation facility designed to support the rapid transfer of shipping containers and international trade between road and rail transportation.

Government Operations committee  It is a question that VIA Rail can answer.

Government Operations committee  As I mentioned, in budget 2013, the government announced— It is the new building Canada fund. That is a 10-year project, with investments that were profiled over each of those 10 years. What we see in these main estimates, the increase of $574.8 million that you referred to, is the forecast from Infrastructure Canada for those projects in the new building Canada fund, which will see cash disbursements this fiscal year.

Government Operations committee  Mr. Blaney, I do not have details of specific P3 investments, but that is something we can research and answer for the committee. As the minister made clear this morning, public-private partnerships can be an effective way of delivering complex and expensive infrastructure projects.

Government Operations committee  To my knowledge, I think that's clear. Renée, as our CFO, would have some first-hand experience with that.

Government Operations committee  Thank you, Mr. Blaney. First of all, I have some information about VIA Rail Canada but, for more detailed information, I feel that you might need to ask VIA Rail Canada directly. The estimates amount presented in the 2016-17 main estimates total, as you noted, is $382.8 million.

Government Operations committee  It's a challenging question in the sense that the initiative to create Shared Services Canada is really quite novel. It had not been done to this scale, to our knowledge, anywhere else in the world, in fact, so when Shared Services Canada was created in 2011, there was a concept to bring this together to both improve service and improve the security posture of government.

Government Operations committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. It's good to be back. My job as the assistant secretary of expenditure management at Treasury Board is to aggregate all of the different spending requests of the government and present them to the committee in the estimates documents. As the minister made clear today, we are presenting in the 2016-17 main estimates requirements totalling $250.1 billion, and this is broken out by our voted amounts of $89.85 billion and statutory requirements of $160.29 billion.

Government Operations committee  As I think everyone understands, the security of our information holdings is a top priority of the government. Since 2010, coordinated efforts by the government have contributed to significant improvements to the Government of Canada's cybersecurity posture. These initiatives have included coordinated approaches to collecting and analyzing cyber-threat intelligence, reducing the overall attack surface by consolidating Internet access points, and standardizing the planning and implementation of network security across the government.

Government Operations committee  It's a shared governance. Within the Treasury Board Secretariat we have a branch, the chief information officer branch, that sets overall policy and security posture for government. They work with Shared Services Canada basically as the face of IT investment and management across the government and also with the Communications Security Establishment and other security agencies to look at threats both internal and external, so there's quite a coordinated approach across government to manage this.

Government Operations committee  I am sorry. I just want to be very clear about the question. Are you speaking about interest payments against the federal debt, or are you speaking about interest payments on a particular government program?

Government Operations committee  The main estimates for 2016-17 total $250.1 billion, and—

Government Operations committee  Yes, right. For many years now, the Department of Finance has developed its fiscal forecast by working with private sector economists. They take the consensus view of a number of economic variables: interest rates, employment rates, the exchange rate. They take that consensus view and use that for their modelling—

Government Operations committee  It is apples to apples. They have been doing it this way for many years now.

Government Operations committee  Is this for the transportation investigation board? Our structure for strategic outcomes allows departments to disaggregate their votes by purpose. In this case, that forecast is the estimate of the current forecast of their authorities for this year for that purpose. The estimates are structured in a way that would allow comparison year over the year, so you can see what they are doing for that purpose or that program.