Thank you, Madam Chair.
First of, I would like to thank Mr. Page and his assistants for appearing here today.
I would like to say that I am quite pleased with the document that you provided us, and I am referring to your opening remarks. Everything is so decentralized. Before your appearance, we heard from officials with the Treasury Board Secretariat. We asked them questions. But each time we tried to question people who watch over all departments, we can never get any answers. We could not find out any more about the specific goals and approaches with respect to the stimulus plan. Answers were hard to come by.
That is also true in this case: we are always told that the answers lie with the deputy ministers. Basically, our committee would have to meet with the deputy ministers from all departments in order to get the answers we are looking for. In particular, how will the freeze on expenditures be implemented, and what will be the impact of that freeze on departments' internal services and staff as well as services to the public?
You have made a very specific request this afternoon—I was not quite able to write it down because things have gone so quickly in the past 10 or 15 minutes. If I am not mistaken, on page 3 of your remarks, you ask for “access to planned (and approved) fiscal framework and departmental annual spending reference levels.” You also say that “we need departmental strategies for savings,” and so on. That is in these two paragraphs.
Madam Chair, I would immediately like to propose that our committee...—I hope that is sufficiently clear.
Since you cannot have that information, perhaps our committee could come through for you.
Could we forward that information to the Parliamentary Budget Officer so that he has the tools to do his work?