Transport committee  I would just clarify that in terms of our mandate, under our legislation we are not entitled to request information from crown corporations. If the bank is a crown corporation, we cannot request information from it and would not be under any obligation to provide information to u

Transport committee  It would be more difficult, certainly.

Transport committee  As you mentioned, it's our mandate. We are a budget office. So we follow the money to the extent that it has economic and fiscal implications, and that's really where we are at. We don't follow money like the Auditor General in terms of whether money has been properly spent or no

Transport committee  Not that we know of, no. We don't really know exactly how it goes.

Transport committee  That's a tough question. As Jean-Denis mentioned, we normally do not make recommendations on policy issues, but one thing we have noticed is that it would be much easier for both Parliament and others who are looking at this if the government provided regular reports on the pro

Transport committee  Certainly that would be very useful from that end. I guess, on the other hand, the federal government is spending the money, so they have to have their own measurement and performance framework to assess how their money is being spent, what the outcomes are, and whether they can

Transport committee  Sure. The point you're raising is very important, and we raised it in our report. Typically, for any program, the government now has a performance measurement framework. Based on that framework and the targets they have identify, they follow the money to see whether it meets tho

Health committee  That's correct.

Health committee  To be clear, our reports, whenever we do a costing, have a section at the end, normally in an annex, which explains the methodology we have used, the data sources, and any other thing that is related to the report. We do not typically provide a daily update or monthly updates on

Health committee  Jurisdictional issues in terms of the provincial jurisdictions, do you mean?

Health committee  What we are doing right now really has nothing to do with the provinces in general. The only thing we need from the provinces is from Quebec, which is to get the list of their formularies in a digital form so we can use it. This cost is a national pharmacare program cost. How i

Health committee  I said I believe the Department of Health has access to these kinds of data for their own purposes, their own research and regulation of drugs. They always have access to all kinds of information about pharmaceuticals, so I'm assuming they have access to these data, but, as I sai

Health committee  We can certainly check with the Department of Health and see what data they have and whether they can legally share it with us—they may be under contractual obligations not to share the data—as well as whether it's up to date. Certainly we can inform the committee of the results.

Health committee  Probably they cannot, because their contract probably does not allow them to share that data with other organizations. I don't know, but it's something we can—

Health committee  We can certainly check and make sure, but they may have the data in a way not directly useful for us. We may need a certain way of gathering that data or putting the data together that this private provider would do for us. They may have access to the raw data, but not in the way