Thank you, Mr. Minister, for being at the committee.
One of the challenges for Canadians and for parliamentarians, with the new government, is trying to read the tea leaves, as it were, to get a sense of what they can trust government to follow through on and where they ought to be skeptical, and to do the work of holding government to account.
What we see, even here today in the document, is a directive to be open by default. That's something the Prime Minister talked about before and during the last election. I'm trying to square that with the parliamentary budget officer's assessment of the information provided to him as part of the last budget, about which he says:
The Government did not provide [as per best practice] detailed tables that identify the impact of changes to its adjustment to the private sector forecast and....
How is it that a culture that's open by default fails, in this new context, to provide the information that heretofore had routinely been provided to the parliamentary budget officer?