Gee, I'm really disappointed to hear that.
Mr. Chair, thank you to the member for submitting this.
First, I have a number of concerns with the whole process that's been brought forward. Let's put it out there. When a political party puts forward its platform, most Canadians would just hope that the process has been done and that good regard and some thought have been put into it. We see now more and more that economists from universities and from different think tanks will weigh in, sometimes at no cost. Sometimes political parties will actually hire someone to have it costed, and that system seems to serve Canadians well. But as positive as the current system is—and I'm sure I may not get some heads nodding on this comment—you could still have planned and costed out the commitment to run $10 billion modest deficits. The PBO could have put out a report, and you would still have elected officials for whatever reason.... I don't think we've been given a proper explanation, but the government came in and it's now running double that or in some cases triple that, depending on the time of year. I don't think having the PBO, a non-partisan office that is supposed to be helping parliamentarians understand government spending, suddenly launched into the private sphere.... Political parties do have some national component, I agree, and they're under somewhat national legislation, but mostly they're private not-for-profits that are there for democratic reasons. I don't see why we'd want to put the PBO into an area where it probably does not want to be.
Second, I talked earlier about small political parties. Now, I'm sure the NDP has a lot of sympathy for the Marxist-Leninist Party, but will those smaller parties be able to meet a certain deadline so they can have what the NDP is envisioning here? Chances are, they will not. To me, this basically puts the Liberals, the Conservatives, and the NDP—the larger parties that are used to putting together fairly broad documents that attract enough attention or that we hire people, like economists with credentials, to examine so we can put those out to the public and then have public scrutiny on them and be accountable for them....
I just fundamentally oppose the idea that we want to take a parliamentary creation, something meant to help parliamentarians understand spending by government, and now apply it to something outside of that, where it has little expertise, to do something it probably does not want to do and for which it is not going to be accountable to anyone, because—guess what—once Parliament is dissolved, are we going to be going back to the PBO to fact-check its facts? I don't think it's going to want to answer. I don't think on any amendments we've done here, even if Ms. May's amendment had been carried, that the PBO would want to be stuck in the middle of a fight over whether its costing is correct.
I just want to take this one last opportunity, Mr. Chair, to say to the government members that this should not be part of the PBO's mandate. This will cause all sorts of headaches.
For example, we were talking earlier about distributive effects. If someone puts a policy forward to, let's say, open up interprovincial trade, I've seen numbers from $5 billion to $10 billion to $150 billion a year as to what it would cost the Canadian economy. Now we're supposed to ask the PBO to somehow present to the Canadian public...and to do politicians' work and do political parties' work, especially since most small parties won't be able to do it, and then somehow it's supposed to give us the fig leaf to carry so we can say, “Look, the PBO costed it for us.”
One last time, Mr. Chair, I will appeal to the government members to please not make the PBO something it was not created to be. Help it help parliamentarians to understand the government's finances, and to understand the nation's economy and the long-term demographics we face. Whether it is through this NDP amendment or the amendments the government has proposed, I would suggest it is the wrong thing for this institution.