Thanks, Mr. Chair.
I guess this is kind of similar to what I had tried to move earlier as a subamendment, so obviously I'm in favour of it. I want to take just a little bit of time to explain why. First, I'd like to just get to the question that was raised about the officials.
It is my understanding that the minister is able to bring along with him whomever he would like; it's within his right to do that. The expectation, I think, is that he would answer questions and maybe if he needed some reference he could turn to them to get some reference or something. If members of the committee feel it's necessary to have them, I'm certainly not opposed to having them come at another time. My understanding, though, is that also, in the motion, on point 2, we would have department officials here for three hours on April 29, if that is what the committee chooses. I don't think I would be opposed to having them here again, but the bottom line is that, at the end of the day, the person responsible, the person who is accountable for this act, on behalf of the government, is the Minister of Finance. It's not the officials; it's not the parliamentary secretary, as they tried one other time. It is the Minister of Finance. He's the one who is responsible. The buck stops there, so to speak—or in this case, the bucks all kind of get thrown out from there.
The bottom line is that he's the one who should be here, and I don't really think that an expectation that he would come for the entire period of time, rather than just half of the period of time, is something that is unreasonable in any kind of way. It certainly seems to me as though that's the appropriate thing. I already mentioned earlier—I don't have to get into it in great detail again—that we've seen things slid into these omnibus bills by this government that are intended to be of sole benefit to some of their elite Liberal friends. We've seen things here that certainly in no way should relate to a budget. I mentioned the one example earlier from this current budget of something that would affect the size and area of ski hills in one particular location in the country, in my riding. These kinds of things are pretty odd things to place in budgets, so there are a lot of questions to be asked about things like that.
Of course, there are also a lot of questions to be asked about broad budgetary policy. We have a government here that had promised it was going to balance the budget by 2019—remember? Here we are, and deficits continue to grow and debt continues to be piled on. There are a lot of legitimate questions about what kind of legacy that leaves for our children and our grandchildren. Those are the kinds of questions that need to be asked too.
To expect that in just half that time, in one and a half hours, we could get to some of these things oddly placed in an omnibus bill and also have a chance to actually ask about the broad budgetary policy of the government, with the limited time.... We have seen in the past—Mr. Poilievre mentioned it earlier—how this finance minister has come in and tried to talk the clock out and hasn't given a lot of opportunity for the actual questions. Certainly there isn't much in the way of answers, so let's have a little more time to be able to get those questions in and, hopefully, maybe even get some answers. Who the heck knows—maybe it'll actually happen this time.