But you are an accountant, Mr. St-Jean, a professional, and you accept legal advice from someone who is not an accountant, not an accounting professional? You are where the buck stops when it comes to the accounting of the Government of Canada, and you allow your decisions to be dictated by someone who doesn't even have an accounting designation? And now you're trying to tell me that it's fine to put into financial statements an unrecorded liability that was not approved by Parliament? You know it should have been approved by Parliament. You acknowledge the fact that it should have been in the appropriations and it wasn't.
I don't know how you can sit here, as a professional, and tell us...dancing around this issue without acknowledging the fact that you know that this should have been in the estimates.