Government Operations committee  One thing you could look at is the documentation itself. Part of doing the tracking document was to look at the way things are presented in the budget versus the way things are presented in the estimates. Let's just say they aligned and everything from the budget was in the mai

Government Operations committee  Well, they see the information in the finance department's budget, so they make their planning based on that. They are not waiting on Parliament to approve it. They see it when the finance department presents their budget.

Government Operations committee  The current practice and quite frankly the OECD best budgeting principles dictate presenting the budget prior to the fiscal year. Parliament should vote prior to the fiscal year, because afterwards spending is already taking place. Plans are already in place. It's really difficul

Government Operations committee  One of the quirks of the way the standing order has been written is that the interim estimates will be referred to standing committees, so standing committees will be able to review those interim estimates. It's not quite clear what kind of questions this committee or others migh

Government Operations committee  One of the advantages of aligning the budget and the main estimates, from a government perspective, is that you can implement things earlier in the fiscal year. One of the things they talked about in their discussion document is that some things take from 15 to 19 months before

Government Operations committee  There is, ironically enough, a positive to the current system. When preparing the tracking document, for which we took budget 2016 and tried to see where it appeared in the estimates, the irony of the current system is that the supplementary estimates provide a lot of detail. The

Government Operations committee  That's a great example. That would be an example of the two processes being integrated and working together. If the Department of Finance works closely with the Treasury Board Secretariat before the budget is prepared—an expenditure review committee would be a way of doing that—t

Government Operations committee  Part of the implication of the process is that you will now have an interim estimate. Currently you have the main estimates and you vote on interim supply at the start of the year and it's roughly three-twelfths of that. Instead, because main estimates are going to be presented a

Government Operations committee  You can't do that, because you're not going to present the main estimates until after the fiscal year has started.

Government Operations committee  One of the interesting things about having the two processes separate is that something can get refined. Something gets announced in the budget—i.e., we're going to do this—but the departments have not been fully brought onside on their planning processes. So they say, well, it's

Government Operations committee  Well, there's a need to strike a balance between parliamentary control and government flexibility. For the government, they need to be able to make changes throughout the year and not have to come to Parliament every time they want to make a change. When you have a vote for Parli

Government Operations committee  As the member had mentioned, there is a pilot program where the grants and contributions of votes of Transport Canada have been divided into subject-type votes. It's a good question whether or not that pilot project will be expanded. The government started this and put it in plac

Government Operations committee  They've had it in place for a year. When members asked the Treasury Board officials how it was going, they said it was going fine. They just haven't made any commitment to expand it, to do anything more with it. How long it would take to expand it across the government to other