Yes.
I'll start with Mr. Page speaking. Then Mr. Lukiwski responds, then Mr. Page, and Mr. Lukiwski. So here we go.
Mr. Page says--and this is just before 5:35 in the afternoon:
For me, the extension of this information as to a cabinet confidence we've challenged on multiple occasions. I think there is a debate that needs to take place as to what is truly cabinet confidence.
Mr. Lukiwski responds:
Mr. Cappe also stated this morning that in his opinion, and I don't know if it was a recommendation perhaps or just an opinion, he didn't believe there should be an Office of the Parliamentary Budget Officer, which was an interesting comment coming from someone who was a former clerk of the Privy Council.
Mr. Page said:
Sir, I had to be pretty much forced to take the job in the first place. Nobody was really keen on being Parliamentary Budget Officer, for multiple reasons.
Mr. Lukiwski said:
I want to go back to the statute again. You talked about what is defined as a cabinet confidence and what is not. You would agree, however, that information that would be contained in a cabinet document would be exempted from any request from your office, yes?
Mr. Page said--and here's where the quote comes in:
Again, there's information that's contained within the actual memorandum of cabinet. There's information that sometimes could be attached to a cabinet document. Again, the question is was this information presented just to cabinet, or was this information circulated widely? Was there an effort to keep this information truly secret?
Most of the costing that I've done, sir, and in fact we see here--and my staff as well have worked at these central agencies--this information is broadly circulated in order to generate estimates.
You can see that he's referring to practices that go on within the government, and that it's not that there's been some departure with this government from past practices when the Liberals were in power, for example, or a greater level of secrecy. It's nothing of that sort, which one could read into paragraph 24, the way it's worded, where it says--and I'm quoting from the report now:
in his professional experience, and having worked in the Privy Council Office, most costing information had been, in the past, “broadly circulated in order to generate estimates”.
That implies a shift here that has not taken place. He's saying that some documents may have been confidential and others were not, based upon the internal practices of the government. None of that nuance is reflected here. I would think we'd have to include a more substantial part of that exchange. I know it's an awkward exchange from the point of view of writing a report, but it's vitally important if we don't want this report to be pretty significantly misleading, although unintentionally misleading. Or we should just drop the paragraph entirely.