Government Operations committee  At the risk of offending provinces—I won't name any specifically—certainly my belief is that some have very good budgeting practices that are very consistent with their accounting practices. I think there are others that still need some improvement, perhaps, in some of their budg

Government Operations committee  I'll hazard a guess--or not a guess, but I'll take a chance on it. I would suggest probably looking at Alberta and British Columbia in particular probably as potential good areas. That doesn't mean I'm saying all the rest are bad; I'm just picking those two out as two that come t

Government Operations committee  Again, it is before my time. I believe that it was a time of rising surpluses, and that probably contributed. It's my understanding that contributed to the ability to have supplementary estimates.

Government Operations committee  There were those challenges, even in a smaller province. For example, at the provincial level the hospitals in New Brunswick were fully consolidated in the province's financial statements. In the main estimates document, there would have been one line for grants to hospitals, whi

Government Operations committee  I'm sorry, were you referring to a recommendation we made? Yes? Okay. Which recommendation?

Government Operations committee  In....

Government Operations committee  Oh, okay. Again, we stand behind that recommendation—

Government Operations committee  I'm sorry to keep sounding like an accountant, but I am one, after all. I think fundamentally the starting point has to be an agreement, as I said earlier, on how you define the entity—so what the government is—and then how you account for things. On those two things there are r

Government Operations committee  I think I can mention some of the things that I felt were good practices in New Brunswick, and that should at least be considered at the federal level. I'm not sure whether they could actually be adopted. Despite the fact that the budget was broken down into many different type

Government Operations committee  Thank you for the clarification. I think I understand better. Instead of moving the fiscal year-end, the same thing could be accomplished by saying that the budget needs to come out in December or in January or whenever, right? As I said, the capital budget in New Brunswick w

Government Operations committee  Again, we have made the recommendation that the main estimates should be on the same basis, an accrual basis, as the budget and the financial statements. We have also made the comment that when you can't make the reconciliation between the main estimates and the budget, it makes

Government Operations committee  I'll go back to my experience in New Brunswick. The main estimates would have agreed with the budget, so when the budget was brought down there was a main estimates document that tied in exactly to the budget. Subsequent to that, during the year it would be possible that there wo

Government Operations committee  As a personal observation and simply going back to my history—and again, understanding that I don't know the complexity of the federal government process—I always felt that it was important to have the main estimates on the same basis as the budget and as the financial statement,

Government Operations committee  So in that type of approach, you need to have both. You need to have the expense on an accrual basis, but then you need to consider also including some other items that represent additional cash that would have to be paid out.

Government Operations committee  Certainly we are always willing to sit down with any member of the committee and talk through what we know about it. But again, we haven't done any audits and we're not doing any audits on this, so we're not going to present any report to Parliament on that. We have also presen