You seem determined to beatify and even canonize our Minister of Finance, and you seem equally determined to vilify and discredit and even demonize the Parliamentary Budget Officer. I notice an aggression just below the surface in your remarks every time you speak about the Parliamentary Budget Officer.
Let me tell you, as the oversight committee for the Treasury Board—the committee that you answer to, the committee that you come to asking permission to spend money—we don't know whom to believe. The public has a right to know, Mr. President, what the government's plans are to dig us out of this deep deficit hole; yet it's been like pulling teeth to try to get that information out of your office and out of government departments.
With the economic stimulus spending, you guys were announcing it from the rooftops. You were spending a fortune bragging about how you were going to spend our way out of the recession. But the flip side of the coin, the economic strategy to dig us out of the deficit we're in now, is now a cabinet confidence; it's a deep dark secret.
So you're asking Canadians to buy a pig in a poke. You're asking us to believe you on face value with no corroborating information, because you've denied us the very numbers we need to measure the veracity of your modelling. You're asking us to believe that within one four-year election cycle, everything will be rosy, whereas the Parliamentary Budget Officer, who has no axe to grind—an independent analyst—says something wildly different. And the IMF, frankly, says something wildly different. They don't agree with the little chart and graph that you just circulated. You just circulated your ideas; you didn't circulate the contradictory ideas from the independent IMF and the independent Parliamentary Budget Officer.
So you can see how it is that we're frustrated and confused and maybe just as angry as you are at having your numbers challenged. We're angry that we're not allowed to even see those numbers. We're asked to take your word for it, when the independent Parliamentary Budget Officer whom we, as Parliament, put in place to check in an independent way the veracity of your models and your numbers...they slam the door in his face. They won't give him the numbers he needs.
And when he does manage to cobble together the numbers, they contradict yours by a long shot. So it's no coincidence that in the weeks leading up to a federal election, you're telling Canadians to give you one four-year election cycle and you will get us out of the red and into the black. Well, nobody else believes that. And in the absence of any numbers, I don't see how you can expect us to believe it.
Let me ask you a question, then, about the—