Thank you very much.
I'd just like to go over the part about things during an election as well. In the technical briefing that I attended, it was discussed that in fact you can request help from departments in order to do the costing. They can provide assistance. There's also confidentiality. You “shall not disclose to a minister any information related to a request for an estimate under subsection (3).” So in fact, there's protection to ensure that the opposition or government side can protect the information that it's requesting.
One of the questions I had related to that, just to get clarification, was about the idea of a proposal versus a platform. For instance, sometimes someone makes a proposal and we want to find out how much it is actually going to cost. This is great. We all have ideas, but if we discover all of a sudden that the idea is not cost-effective or it's very expensive, perhaps we're going to decide at that point not to move forward with it, perhaps we don't want to be debating a policy proposal during an election. I think there's a certain distinction to be made between a platform and having that flexibility regarding what people are asking for.
I also think though—and this is just my opinion—that in the long term, there's going to be an increase or a desire for.... For instance, journalists are going to ask the parties whether they had things costed out by the PBO. Over time, there's going to be almost a requirement that every time a political party shows up with a proposal during an election, it's going to need to have that cost analysis. I'm also certain that the ministers.... Because civil servants won't be serving the government at that time since there's an election on, they will hopefully be serving you and making sure you can get the information you need.
That's just my comment after reading the legislation.
I'd just like to go back to Mr. Liepert's commentary. It's not just parliamentarians; I think there's actually the cabinet. There are parliamentarians, which cabinet is also a part of, and then the people. I think it's incumbent upon parliamentarians to hold cabinet and government to account. I was just wondering how we all also hold the PBO to account for decisions that are made. How in the legislation or in the proposed legislation would you propose that we could hold you to account to ensure that you're doing the work of individual parliamentarians—not government but parliamentarians themselves?