Public Accounts committee  I have a couple of comments when you're looking at the lapses. Parliament votes money in three different votes. It's an antiquated system, but it's operating, capital, and grants and contributions. If I recall correctly, the lapse at Fisheries and Oceans was around capital. They had delays in projects, and so the money is sliding and is re-profiled.

Public Accounts committee  Sorry, can I just interject one thing, if you don't mind? If you're interested, in section 4 of volume I, the EI account actually has its own financial statements, so if you want to follow up on those and actually track against projections, they get their own audit opinion.

Public Accounts committee  I'll start and if others want to join in, please do. The important thing about the benefits for the elderly is that they are statutory votes. So they're actually protected in legislation as opposed to being voted on by Parliament each year. The benefits themselves are a function of the number of recipients who are of the appropriate age, and the payments that they receive on a biweekly basis.

Public Accounts committee  This is an interesting question. I know that we are following the accounting standards established in Canada by the Public Sector Accounting Board. It doesn't require any such recognition of liabilities for all pension plans. That doesn't fit our accounting standard model. I do appreciate there's an international norm out there.

Public Accounts committee  Thank you for the question. I have a couple of thoughts on that. The table, which in the English version is on page 1.24 if you're trying to follow along, presents a 10-year history. That's the reason we stopped at 2005 in this case. We gave a 10-year history, which is a nice comparator.

Public Accounts committee  I can't speak to the plans on the shipbuilding and what the Parliamentary Budget Officer's analysis is based on. There have been delays. As I've said, as time goes on, you do lose inflation dollars on things like steel.

Public Accounts committee  I have a couple of comments on the pension plan in general. The liabilities of the government's pension plan are included in the financial statements, and you'll see those there. The pension plan produces its own financial statements. The organization in question here is a crown corporation.

Public Accounts committee  I can comment on the lapse in general, and I will get back to your specific question. The lapse in general is not well understood. I do want to make one very important point. When Parliament authorizes spending, it's an “up to” amount. It's not that you must spend a hundred; it's an “up to” or a maximum.

Public Accounts committee  The “other” would be things like one-offs. If I recall correctly, the transfer to the Province of Alberta related to flood relief is in other transfers. It's not a regular program. That's a one-off you would see. That is driving the change there.

Public Accounts committee  That's why you see the increases. If I remember correctly, the Alberta flood relief is in that number, and it was $2.2 billion.

Public Accounts committee  Thank you for the question. I'm going to turn to my colleague to give me the page number—

Public Accounts committee  It's on page 1.10 in French. Thank you. This is the transfer payment section and if you look at the public accounts, we list the main elements on page 1.9. We start with elderly benefits, those being your guaranteed income supplement and your old age security. As we've discussed, those numbers are going up because of the increasing elderly population.

Public Accounts committee  Those are the major components there, and then that makes up a fairly significant portion of our total spending, as you can see. What I will say about the transfers to persons, especially the GIS/OAS, is that from a government planning perspective those are statutory in nature, so if you went to the estimates you wouldn't see them actually voted on.

Public Accounts committee  The big two there are the Canada health transfer and the social transfer, and I believe those were legislated increases in the past year, so those are the two big numbers driving those. You have other ones as well, but those are the two main ones I would highlight for you. Nick, if you want to add something, feel free to.

Public Accounts committee  In terms of what else is in that $34 billion, maybe if you can give me a minute we can answer your question, but we'll come back to that one. If you wanted to keep going down that list, you have other program expenses for crown corporations and departments and agencies. The amount for crown corporations, you'll see, has dropped from 2012-13.