Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I'd like to welcome back the honourable member Yves Duclos. I always enjoy your presence and certainly your leadership. Welcome to all of your staff here, as well.
I want to follow up on the Parliamentary Budget Officer's bombshell of a report on the financial and fiscal analysis of federal pay equity. You may recall—and I've shared this story before—that my mother used to work for Industry Canada. I can remember being a teenager and her explaining to me why she received an equalization payment as a federal member of government because, as a woman, she wasn't getting paid the equivalent to her male counterparts. Fast forward 20 years. Here we are today.
We know from the report that the “PBO requested information from the Treasury Board regarding the valuation of administering this legislation and implementing a proactive pay equity regime within the federal public service”, yet the Treasury Board “refused to disclose information or data regarding employee compensation.” This is on page 8 under section 2. Furthermore, “This included the number of employees who were impacted in each occupational group, and related increases in employee wages and benefits attributed to the Pay Equity Act. The information was deemed to be a confidence of the Queen's Privy Council”. It left the PBO to rely on “publicly available sources in its analysis of employee compensation for the federal public service.”
With a Treasury Board and a government that claims to be open by default, how do you justify not giving the PBO the critical information it needs to be able to provide Parliament with a critical analysis on federal pay equity?