Mr. Speaker, let me begin by congratulating you for the honour of presiding in that chair. I have every confidence that your judgment will be as good as your eyesight when you recognize the NDP way down in this corner where we reside.
My congratulations, too, to the Minister of Transport for accepting this important role.
I think the minister would agree with me that freedom of information is the oxygen that democracy breathes. I know he has experience in government and would agree with me that access to information is one of those rights that we enshrine in Canada and is one of the instruments by which we shine a light on the operations of government and feature open government as one of the cornerstones of our democracy.
Could the minister explain why his government has seen fit, under its new accountability, act to strip out the access to information reform that was the centrepiece of that piece of legislation? Why is his government going to ground, as it were, and slamming the door on true transparency and openness when surely he knows, as everyone in this country knows, that transparency and accountability have become the buzzwords of Ottawa today? If we had true access to information laws and open government, we would have 30 million auditors scrutinizing the operations of government rather than one overworked Auditor General.