Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Thank you very much, Professor Schick. It's very interesting.
I am the new official opposition critic and new to the committee, but I've had an opportunity to go through the proceedings of previous witnesses. I have to say I'm reassured that all the esteemed experts who have testified seem to be on the same page. Dr. Joachim Wehner, you probably know, an assistant professor from LSE, recently gave very similar testimony about changing the timing of the estimates, the budgets, and so forth—and certainly on openness and transparency.
We have a Parliamentary Budget Officer, who actually presented one of his reports today. He expressed again his frustration with the lack of transparency and timely provision of information from the government to his office. He has pointed out that a good deal of that information is collected, readily available, and reported to the Treasury Board, but it is not passed on to Parliament in order to do the scrutiny of the budgets and estimates. It's not necessarily passed on to the PBO.
Dr. Wehner recommended that there should be stronger protections and an enhanced role of the Parliamentary Budget Officer to ensure access to relevant information, and that the Parliamentary Budget Officer be made a full officer of Parliament.
I wonder if you would like to comment on that. Do you have a similar kind of officer in the United States?