Moved third reading of Bill C-15, An Act for granting to Her Majesty certain sums of money for the federal public administration for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2022.

She said: Honourable senators, I am pleased to rise today to introduce the appropriation bill for the 2021-22 Supplementary Estimates (C).

Through this appropriation bill, the government requests Parliament’s approval of the planned spending proposals that are detailed in the Supplementary Estimates (C).

As my esteemed colleagues well know, the appropriation bill is a vehicle through which payments from the Consolidated Revenue Fund are authorized for government programs and services.

The voted amounts in these supplementary estimates represent maximum “up to” ceilings or estimates. It is, therefore, not out of the ordinary if these amounts are not fully spent over the course of the year. The actual expenditures are listed in the Public Accounts of Canada, which are tabled after the end of the fiscal year.

The estimates family of documents, which consists of the Main Estimates, supplementary estimates, departmental plans and departmental results reports, in conjunction with the public accounts, help parliamentarians scrutinize government spending. This scrutiny is a key element of our parliamentary system. This scrutiny, we must acknowledge, is not always a straightforward matter.

A number of our colleagues on the Standing Senate Committee on National Finance did express some difficulty in ascertaining information in a timely fashion. I want to assure my colleagues that the Government Representative Office in the Senate has taken note, and continues to consistently deploy its best efforts to bring this to the attention of the government.

That said, I will talk about the Supplementary Estimates (C), 2021-22, which form the basis of this appropriation bill.

As my colleagues know, supplementary estimates present information on additional spending requirements that were either not sufficiently developed in time for inclusion in the Main Estimates or that were subsequently refined to account for recent developments.

The Supplementary Estimates (C), 2021-22, were tabled in the Senate on February 21, 2022. These are the third and final supplementary estimates for the current fiscal year.

In general, they provide information on $13.2 billion in new voted spending for 70 federal organizations. They also present information on an additional amount of $3.9 billion in planned statutory budgetary expenditures.

It is important to note that these statutory expenditures were authorized either under existing laws or in the proposed—