Thank you.
I want to thank my colleagues for giving me time to speak at this committee. It's not often that I get to participate at the finance committee, so I would really like to thank them for this opportunity.
As we were saying earlier, I would expect the Minister of Finance to be more than happy to come to this committee and explain the government's budget. This is the finance committee. This is the committee that's responsible for scrutinizing her work and scrutinizing the finance department. I note that we had nearly 50 bureaucrats here today to do just that and explain what the budget was all about, and explain the implementation act that is Bill C-47. We heard about a great many things.
What's interesting is that the bureaucrats are generally empowered to implement the actions of the government, not necessarily to explain why these things have been chosen. Generally, the buck stops with the minister, so it's interesting that the minister is not interested in showing up, or that this motion does not require her to appear for a couple of hours. That seems like it would be the bare minimum of the minister's obligations. I would note that we had several bureaucrats here today who said they were knowledgeable on the technicality of what's being implemented, but as to the logic and the why, that generally falls to the political staff or the politicians, or the finance minister in general.
It's frustrating to hear that we're not able to hear from the finance minister for a couple of hours. I was very interested in—and we had some of the bureaucrats here talking about it—the clean—