Finance committee  Sir, the public accounts are audited by the Auditor General.

Finance committee  Sir, we receive the information for our database from the Receiver General. Frankly, when there are anomalies, we have an opportunity to discuss it with them, with the departments, and it's a normal process. When it was brought to their attention, they promptly worked to resolve

Finance committee  Sir, there are always potential improvements in hand-offs between one agency and another. When we were quoted, it was treated as an issue that was probably different from the actual issue, which was rather technical in nature.

Finance committee  One of the things we do—not only do we provide this integrated monitor and database for parliamentarians, but on a quarterly basis we provide an expenditure monitor that provides reporting of major variances in items. That report provides an opportunity for us to scrub some of th

Finance committee  We'll be releasing a report tomorrow that looks at the quarterly financial reporting of the departments, and, in advance, you'll note that some departments do report the impacts of the Budget 2000 freeze. So there are some high water marks, and it could be very helpful for parlia

Government Operations committee  I would also add that, in order to make the process more effective, it might be a good idea to incorporate the budget bill into the supply bill, as some countries do. The two would be a bit more in sync. That would enable parliamentarians to deal with only one amount and to focus

Government Operations committee  I think that it is all about synchronization. Yes, we think that it can help parliamentarians to understand the process. It is really a matter of whether they want to see the two things integrated, perhaps by changing the calendar. Actually, some countries introduce two bills at

Government Operations committee  When we try to describe in our reports what's available to parliamentarians in the way of information, we try to ask for things already collected in the ordinary course of business. The idea is not to impose a new activity burden or a new cost burden on the government. We can sho

Finance committee  Thank you for the question, Mr. McKay. Right now the program is in what is referred to as low-rate initial production. So you have net R and D costs, you have relatively high costs associated with small batches of early production associated with the risks and challenges at that

Finance committee  That's $148 million, sir. So as countries decide to postpone delivery, it does two things: it potentially reduces the cost, but then all the other aircraft subsequent to that point actually then have to absorb the cost increase, because essentially we're looking at what has been

Finance committee  Effectively, if you look at where Canada was originally looking to purchase, that point would have been in a fairly high level of this current learning curve associated with the production in the low-rate initial production, which would have been a relatively high cost compared t

Finance committee  Thank you for the question. When we produced this report for parliamentarians a year ago, public estimates were not easily readily available for the F-35A variant, nor were long-term sustainment costs, so at that time we felt this would be.... Well, we were asked to produce this

Public Accounts committee  Sir, we actually made a number of requests after the finance committee motion to get additional details. We have these actually published on our website.

Public Accounts committee  Actually, sir, we have not been provided with the details of the modelling exercise. The response we had was that they were using information provided by the project office.

Public Accounts committee  We were not asked to.... Our request from Parliament was not to review their model, sir.