Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to the Minister.
Minister, I want to run through a history. It has to do with cost, and I think it's pretty central to the estimates in front of us. It must have been about two years ago that I made a request for the Parliamentary Budget Officer to review the cost of all the bills that were before Parliament that had implications with respect to incarceration. The Parliamentary Budget Officer agreed to undertake that study. In that period of time all I heard from his office was that there was absolutely no cooperation from either your office or from Correctional Service Canada. In fact, it was so bad he had to dedicate one-third of his staff and all kinds of resources to create statistical models to recreate the data that was refused to him. The reason given was that it was cabinet confidence.
Now we move forward as the Parliamentary Budget Officer was blocked from doing his job and Parliament was unable to know what the costing of bills was as we went forward.
Mr. Chair, my concern is that it took the Speaker of the House to say this behaviour was completely inappropriate, that you cannot hide information from either Parliament or Canadians. And still the documentation was not handed over. A contempt motion was passed by a committee of Parliament, and still today, nearly two years after seeking.... With 18 bills before us, the Parliamentary Budget Officer tells us that more than 55% of the data is missing, and we don't have the information.
The question is simple. How can you expect Parliament to vote on bills for which it has no idea of the cost? How can you expect Canadians to weigh decisions about relative priorities when a blindfold is essentially put on them, not allowing them to know what the truth is? And why, Minister, do you refuse to hand over the documents, refuse to cooperate with the office of the Parliamentary Budget Officer, and refuse to come clean on these costs?