Mr. Chair, this amendment deals with the question of how much this piece of legislation wants to tie the hands of the parliamentary budget officer in terms of looking at things that parliamentarians have a right to know. The way the mandate is currently structured, it says that the parliamentary budget officer may prepare reports—that sounds discretionary—but then the list of the kinds of topics on which the parliamentary budget officer may comment is quite limited: the budget, an economic or fiscal update, a fiscal sustainability report, or estimates.
Mr. Chair, you will recall how important it was in the 41st Parliament when the parliamentary budget officer wrote up a report on what the F-35s were really going to cost. That doesn't fall under any of those categories of a budget, an economic or fiscal update, a sustainability report, or the estimates.
Diving into an area that parliamentarians need to know about is something we want the parliamentary budget officer to be able to do, so my amendment changes it from being an exclusive list, “(i) to (iv)”, and expands it by taking out the words “any of the following”, allowing items (i) to (iv) to be for the purpose of examples—these are the kinds of things the parliamentary budget officer can examine. It would change that last bit to the “Parliamentary Budget Officer's analysis of federal government documents, including:” Then we list them as examples, but it's no longer an exclusive list to tie the PBO's hands.