I'm going to try to get back into some legalities on this thing. I actually find it surprising that it seems to be the chartered accountants who understand that section 53 of our Constitution basically says that government cannot spend any public revenue without...it says it “shall originate in the House of Commons”. We have three liabilities here that I can see that have occurred in consecutive years, and I do not see that any one of these liabilities ever originated in the House of Commons.
Then I go to the Financial Administration Act...and I expect you, as the Comptroller General, sir, to be quite familiar with these provisions because that's your job. There's section 26 of the act that reinforces what the Constitution says. Section 37.1 is quite clear on it; it says other arrangements similar in kind to a contract. And here are you and your people, running off trying to get a lawyer to give you some sort of legal opinion that gives a third way.
Mr. Baker said there are two ways this matter could be dealt with: you've blown the vote or you go back to Parliament and get approval on supplementary.... You seem to be suggesting we have a third way of dealing with it. Government can go ahead, a department can go ahead, and book expenses, enter contracts or things similar in kind, and then after the fact--not originating in the House of Commons, but after the fact--you can report it in your general statements, not with the department on the appropriations, but in the general statement where we're probably dealing with $2 billion. You can just put something in there saying “unrecorded liability”, which is a catch-22 if I ever heard one.
Are you saying that this new exotic, creative way of accounting is the way we're going to proceed in this count? We book the expenses, incur the cost, and then after the fact we come back to Parliament, in defiance of section 53, and ask for approval. That's good financial management?