Thank you.
To respond to the question that Mr. Turnbull put to me, the Conservatives expect accountability and transparency from the government. It's been lacking in so many ways over the last 11 years, and these amendments are meant to encourage the government to embrace reporting and data.
I mentioned earlier the Auditor General reports that frequently cite the poor tracking of data and the lack of information that the government has to measure its own success and failure. This comes up time and time again, where the Auditor General looks at a department and says that they don't have the data to measure the efficacy of whatever they're undertaking. They get their spending authorization from Parliament, and they get told what their objectives are. Without data, the public service may think they're doing a fine job, but when the Auditor General comes in they find that they are not doing as well as they think they are, and they don't have the data to benchmark their results.
That's why we are big on transparency and accountability. Accountability comes with being able to measure the progress of items.
With this one in particular.... I had a private member's bill in the last Parliament about the excise escalator. It's funny that the government brought in the escalator. There was no escalator before. It used to be that the government had to vote increases on excise in the House of Commons, just like the Crown has had to do since the Magna Carta. They've had to turn to Parliament to be able to tax citizens.
They gave themselves the escalator. Then, in subsequent years when the escalator became increasingly unpopular, especially among brewers as well as among consumers, they went ahead and reduced the rate at which they were automatically increasing the excise on alcohol. We don't agree with the policy of an automatic escalator on excise. When the government then, from year to year, tinkers with it by not increasing per the automatic increase that they gave themselves, we want to see accountability and we want to see the reporting as described in the motion.
Since it appears that the government will not support this amendment, I might try to see if we can massage it a little bit with a subamendment. I'm going to propose that the amendment be amended by replacing paragraph (b) of the proposed subsection 15.1(2) with the following:
(b) an assessment of the impact of those sections on domestic alcohol producers, including on small and medium-sized brewers; and
(c) a summary of any publicly available data used to prepare the assessment referred to in paragraph (b).
Just for the record, once this is translated, I wish to speak to the subamendment.