Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Welcome, Mr. Stilborn, and thank you for your ideas, obviously based on a lot of experience.
I'd like to follow up on the discussion that's been going on about providing information riding by riding. I can certainly think of an obvious program where that was being requested; it was like pulling teeth, and that was the economic action plan.
Of course, where you have a plan like that where the intent is supposedly to provide jobs across the country, then it's pretty obvious that the MPs in each region, particularly those areas where there's high unemployment, are going to want to know. To do your job as a parliamentarian, you're going to want to have the information that tells you, okay, what's the overall expenditure, what are the policy objectives, where's that money being expended, and who's benefiting from it. Certainly, the process we went through on that was not open and transparent, and some MPs, to their credit, took their own staff time, hours and hours, getting that information.
Not necessarily about the riding by riding, but your recommendation about availability of information.... It's interesting that all the other experts who have appeared seemed to drill down to that, and certainly seemed to be endorsing what the Parliamentary Budget Officer was calling for even today. He noted that a good deal of this information is already provided to Treasury Board in a detailed way, and there doesn't seem to be any logical reason why that same information couldn't be made available to parliamentarians or certainly to the Parliamentary Budget Officer, who could in turn report.
A number of experts have recommended that the Parliamentary Budget Officer should report throughout the year, and perhaps monthly, on spending and comparison with policy proposals. I'm wondering what your comment might be there.
I think your idea is a good one. I don't think the detailed information would be of relevance and interest to MPs just on a riding-by-riding basis, but certainly to have the comparison on particular policy areas that they're following would be.