Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank for the explanations. Just a comment, I am pretty much floored by the fact that the numbers that we have in front of us for this department were not comparing apples to apples basically. These numbers have been fudged, so to speak, to remove the 71
positions from the previous year’s estimates so that the numbers can look good. I’m having difficulty following this, so I can only imagine what somebody in the public is going to be doing in looking at this. They are going to think everything is just grand.
There’s no reference in here to the fact that the numbers have been adjusted for the 71 positions. There should be a comment, for heaven sakes, somewhere in the budget which says that there should be a corresponding comment in the Finance section, and yet this basically looks like everything is the same from one year to the next and we absolutely know it’s not. The Minister mentioned I forget however many hundreds of millions of dollars that it is off, so just a comment. I really would recommend that we don’t do this again. Thank you.