Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
It is now my turn to say that I am delighted to welcome Mr. Page and his team to our committee meeting.
I do not want to spend too much time reiterating comments made by my Bloc and Liberal colleagues, but I must say that last spring, when the time came to determine our priorities, we felt that a boost was your priority. You could not discharge your duties pursuant to the mandate assigned to you by Parliament, in other words, to work in the public interest, if you did not have the resources you need.
So if an army travels on its stomach, your office travels on its wallet. If you couldn't have your employees there, you couldn't do your job, and the rest of it we could fight about afterwards.
I am outraged, truly, that the Parliamentary Librarian continues, despite the unanimous will of Parliament, to try to stifle your office. It is scandalous, contempt of Parliament, and we intend to tell him so on the first possible occasion.
I would like to start by referring to the famous Accountability Act, whose title is ill-chosen. It should have been referred to, in French, as the Loi sur l'imputabilité. Apparently, from now on, it is the deputy ministers who are accountable. There is some discussion as to whether or not infrastructure spending is being done by the book.
Last week, I was able to show that you had been handed a huge stack of unprocessed documents, without a synopsis or summary, nor the electronic means to access the documents. In concrete terms it is quite obvious, if we turn to this Accountability Act. The electronic version must exist, because the deputy minister has a legal obligation to create such systems. Am I wrong?