Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak on the subject of this bill.
I would like to congratulate my colleague from Papineau, who seeks to correct the French title of the bill because the use of the word “imputabilité” is not correct in this context according to the Office québécois de la langue française. We should use the word "responsabilité" instead.
That said, my party and I expected a lot from this accountability bill, particularly with respect to the independent budget forecaster, referred to in the bill as the Parliamentary Budget Officer, and to the transparency of foundations. I will address these two points over the next few minutes. I find the bill very disappointing in many ways, including its wording, and especially in its treatment of these two issues.
With respect to the Parliamentary Budget Officer, we expected that once the Conservatives came into power, they would have something substantial to offer. After all, they have been preaching for years in support of the Bloc Québécois' demands for transparent figures—real numbers—in, for example, budget and surplus forecasts. One need only study the mandate and powers of the Parliamentary Budget Officer to see that the position has no real power. So we are back to square one.
Allow me to offer a historical profile, since 1997-98, at least, of parliamentary activity regarding budget forecasts.
When the Liberals were in power, the Prime Minister, a former finance minister and an hon. member of this House, would present us every year with data that had no relation to reality. Every year he forecast zero surpluses, even though the surpluses accumulating from month to month indicated that we were heading for figures well above zero. So we were told nonsense for years and years, to the point that, starting in 1997-98, when we saw the Liberals presenting us with figures totally devoid of sense and contrary to reality, we in the Bloc Québécois decided to form a small team and do our own surplus projections.
Mr. Speaker, you have been in this House for years, and you were a witness to this: we managed to come up with surplus forecasts that were within 3% or 4% of the actual numbers. With a small team and a pocket calculator bought on sale for $2.98, we managed to make accurate forecasts which reflected the real situation. But year after year, this charade continued.
I was listening to my Liberal colleague earlier. I was totally flabbergasted to hear him speak of transparency, when the Liberals were in power for 13 years and showed no transparency at all.
We know what happened with the sponsorship scandal, but even with these forecasts, when the Liberals were making these meaningless forecasts, they were trampling on basic democratic principles. For the people to be able to form an opinion on the intelligence of a government, or its ability to meet their needs, they need to be presented with the real picture of public finances. Otherwise they will say, it may be true that the government does not have the resources to meet the needs of the most disadvantaged persons in society; to invest in social housing; or to reform the employment insurance program so that it does not exclude 60% of workers, as it now does thanks to the Liberals. But the figures were completely opposite to reality. There were forecast errors in the neighbourhood of 300%. And year after year, surpluses of $12 billion to $14 billion were accumulating. At fiscal year-end, there was no provision for the redistribution of this money, to help the most disadvantaged of society and to lighten the tax burden. What is more, these unexpected surpluses, these surpluses juggled and fiddled by the Liberals, were, in large part, allocated to paying down the debt.
The Bloc Québécois led a battle with the Conservatives at its side, and even with the cooperation, in the Standing Committee on Finance, of Mr. Penson, a veteran member who has left this House, and the current Minister of Citizenship and Immigration, who was a worthy representative of his party on that committee. That battle was to get an independent forecast office, one that would give us figures that looked right, that were meaningful, and that reflected the real situation.
They even supported two Bloc Québécois motions to create an independent office of budgetary estimates. They went so far as to introduce another motion spelling out the mandate of this office. They supported a second Bloc motion. This one proposed that, while we waited for this office to be set up, four independent forecasters should be hired, one per party, who would provide figures that made sense, rather than the far-fetched figures of the Liberal government.
In this bill, the position of parliamentary budget officer is an empty shell. This person reports to the Library of Parliament. He is not given the power to access essential information. We are not speaking here about the information on individual citizens held by the Canada Revenue Agency but about aggregate data. He does not have access, either, to information from the Department of Finance. This was exactly the problem that we faced. I thought that the Conservatives were going to improve the situation, but no, this bill does not make it any better.
The greatest obstacle we faced in getting accurate forecasts, even when we hired forecasters who were independent of the government, was access to information. Senior officials in the finance department told us that they did not have time to deal with this because they were tied up with other tasks, such as the budget. Or else they just cavalierly told us that we could not have this information because the minister did not permit them to provide it to forecasters. So that was the situation we faced.
Even when the new position of parliamentary budget officer is created, we will still have the same problem. How can the parliamentary budget officer arrive at accurate, sensible figures when he does not have access to this information?
In addition, the budget officer should report to Parliament. He should basically have the same powers—although perhaps not the same budget—as the Auditor General, that is to say, the ability to get all the information he needs to provide real figures to the people of Canada. The budget officer is not vested with this mandate. He will not have the tools he needs to provide us with forecasts. We will be obliged to continue making these forecasts ourselves every year and making them as accurate as possible, as the Bloc Québécois has always done.
At times I see a dichotomy between what the Conservative government says and the facts. We can see it in this bill, where transparency and compliance with the fundamental principles of democracy are not part of the game plan. We also noted it during oral question period yesterday and the day before, when we simply asked the Minister of Finance if it were true they had created five foundations before March 31 in which to deposit $1.3 billion in order to meet social housing, transportation and other needs. The minister did not deign to reply. Is that transparency? He told us to wait for the budget. But it has nothing to do with the upcoming budget. It concerns the previous budget, money allocated in the previous fiscal year. So there is a gap between what the government says and the facts of the matter.
I will cite a second example of the lack of transparency in the bill. It concerns the foundations. Why did the government resort to dirty tricks in its efforts to explain why it had decided to make only three foundations of nine subject to the Access to Information Act? The three foundations in question are the Canadian Millennium Foundation, the Canada Foundation for Innovation and the Canada Foundation for Sustainable Development Technology. Why permit public scrutiny through the Access to Information Act of these three only and not the other six as well?
There is $2 billion in the coffers of the other six. Under this bill, they will continue to be outside public scrutiny and debate in the House. Parliamentarians will not be able to follow what is happening in these foundations because the government has decided to continue to hide them from public scrutiny.
I would like someone to explain why this bill does not apply to all of the foundations. Why keep $2 billion of taxpayers' money from vital public scrutiny? I am waiting for an answer from the government.
As I wait, I can assure this House that we will introduce amendments in order to improve this bill, which is disappointing in some respects.