Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thank you to the witnesses for appearing today. Congratulations, Mr. Page, on your new position.
I am concerned about a couple of things. The first is that we've seen a real disconnect between the reality of what's come forward and the rhetoric of what's offered. I have some concern in this regard with some of the constraints that are being placed on your office, when we see a government that campaigned on transparency and we have all kinds of things that we still just simply haven't seen, whether it's the appointment of a public appointments commissioner, new rules for lobbyists, or whether it's the fact that access to information times have dramatically increased by a factor of about five times, the killing of the CAIRS database, and the list goes on and on.
In this specific example, the Conservative Party election platform said governments cannot be held to account if Parliament does not know the accurate state of its public finances. The problem I have with that is that your office is not going to be up and running until the fiscal update in the fall of 2009. It's going to be nearly three years after the government took power before it comes into place. That's three federal budgets. That's two fiscal updates.
Not only is there an enormous amount of time that has transpired, but my real concern is that you're going to be operating out of the Library of Parliament. The Library of Parliament performs an extremely important function on providing non-partisan advice to Parliament, but in this instance, instead of being like an auditor with the ability to challenge and really take on the government when it disagrees, you're going to be relying upon the finance department for your analytics and are going to be within the Library of Parliament.
I'm wondering how you're going to be able to challenge the government or how you're going to be able to take a look at this information and be able to provide Parliament with an alternative viewpoint when you're relying upon the finance department for your analytics and when you're in the Library of Parliament, whose traditional role has been more to supply non-partisan information and not necessarily take a position or advocate for a particular viewpoint as, say, an Auditor General would.