Mr. Speaker, it is my pleasure to rise in the House this morning and speak to Bill C-572, the strengthening fiscal transparency act. As my hon. colleague who introduced the bill said, it would give oxygen to accountability. The Liberal Party is committed to making the Parliamentary Budget Officer truly independent so that he or she can properly do the job.
As the Conservatives used to say, Canadians need an independent Parliamentary Budget Officer to “ensure truth in budgeting”. Since he was appointed in March 2008, the PBO has been prolific in telling Canadians the truth about Canada's books. He has explained to us how the Conservative government is the biggest borrowing and biggest spending government in Canadian history. He has demonstrated how the Conservatives have combined reckless tax cuts and massive spending increases to give Canada a structural deficit even before the economic downturn began.
Last month the PBO showed us how the Conservatives are putting Canada even deeper into debt and how there is an 85% chance the Conservatives will break their promise to balance the budget by 2015-16. Time after time the Parliamentary Budget Officer has been proven right while the Minister of Finance has been forced to revise his numbers to more closely match those of the PBO.
The Parliamentary Budget Officer has also told Canadians the truth about how much more we will have to spend on prisons because of the Conservative crime agenda. The Conservatives initially told Canadians that their truth in sentencing act would cost only $90 million over two years. Then under pressure, they revised this figure to $2 billion over five years. Now thanks to the Parliamentary Budget Officer, we know this legislation will actually cost the federal government closer to $5 billion over five years, plus an estimated $5 billion to $8 billion at the provincial level, for a total cost to Canadians of $10 billion to $13 billion over five years. That is a far cry from the initial promise of just $90 million.
That is not the only example of the PBO telling the truth about reckless Conservative spending. He has also told the truth about how slow the federal progress has been on stimulus projects, as well as how the Conservatives have underestimated the actual cost of Canada's mission in Afghanistan.
Unfortunately, the Conservatives find these truths to be somewhat inconvenient. The Conservative government has a record of attacking public servants who dare to speak truth to power. We have seen this in how they have treated Colonel Pat Stogran, the former Veterans Ombudsman; Munir Sheikh, the former head of Statistics Canada; Linda Keen, the former chair of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission; Rémy Beauregard, the former chair of Rights & Democracy; and Canadian diplomat Richard Colvin, to name just a few. Sadly, we can also add Kevin Page, the current Parliamentary Budget Officer, to this list.
In September, former deputy finance minister Scott Clark and former director of fiscal policy Peter DeVries wrote about how the Conservatives have mistreated the PBO. They said:
...no one should be surprised, given the...[Conservative] government's dislike of independent research and opposing opinion. When it confronts disagreement with its preconceived views, and facts that don't support these views, its modus operandi is simply to get rid of the source of this disagreement and to ignore the facts.
The Conservatives have shown contempt for the PBO by trying to deny Mr. Page the resources he needs to do his job. The Parliament of Canada Act states that the PBO is entitled to “free and timely access to any financial or economic data in the possession of the department that are required for the performance of his or her mandate”.
But the PBO has complained that the government will not even share basic financial information, such as baseline departmental spending levels or how the government plans to achieve its operating budget freeze. This despite the Conservatives' election platform, which promised to “require government departments and agencies to provide accurate, timely information to the Parliamentary Budget Authority to ensure it has the information it needs...”. It is just another broken Conservative promise.
However, the Conservatives are not simply trying to starve Mr. Page of information. Last year they also tried to frustrate Mr. Page's work by cutting $1 million from his budget.
National Post columnist Kelly McParland pointed out the blatant hypocrisy of this Conservative move when he wrote:
This from a government that spends tens of millions blowing its own horn over the stimulus program, even forcing municipalities to pay for signs promoting the plan, or lose the funding.
Mr. McParland continued, “Get real, Tories. Give the man his money and quit acting so childish”.
Unfortunately, Mr. Page is still fighting for his budget. Earlier this month Mr. Page told the finance committee:
...I've spent a whole year fighting to get my budget back. It took me two years to get my HR plan approved. Our budget is frozen at 2.8%.
To this the Conservatives replied:
Yes, frozen, but that doesn't mean it can't go in the other direction. That's not a threat; that's the reality.
Despite these threats from this Conservative government, Mr. Page is continuing his fight for more independence, and to make it clear he is not doing so out of self-interest, Mr. Page has announced that he will not seek another term after his current mandate expires.
It is my hope that Canada will have a new government before then, a new Liberal government, because a Liberal government will not only give the PBO real independence so he can do his job; we will also implement the Liberal open government initiative and end this Conservative era of secrecy and control. We will start by directing all federal departments and agencies to adopt a default principle of open government when it comes to sharing information.
As part of a Liberal open government initiative, we will also restore the long form census. We will publish as many government data sets as possible, online, free of charge and in an open searchable format, starting with the Statistics Canada data. We will also publish all access to information requests, responses and response times, and we will publish information on government grants, contributions and contracts through an online searchable database. We will do that because, as Liberals, we believe Canadians are entitled to this information. We believe that Canadian taxpayers have a right to know how their tax dollars are being spent, and we recognize that it is impossible for Canadians to know where their tax dollars are going or if government is getting value for money without access to usable and searchable government information.
Speaking of tax dollars, I would like to address one final aspect of Bill C-572. There has been some discussion on whether or not the bill would require royal recommendation. I do not believe it should. Bill C-572 adjusts the structure of the PBO by removing him from under the authority of the Parliamentary Librarian and giving him the rank of deputy head of a department. However, the office of the PBO already exists, although it is within the Library of Parliament, and the PBO already has a budget with which to pay salaries and enter into contracts.
Given these facts, I do not believe that Bill C-572 requires that the federal government spend any additional funds whatsoever.
To conclude, I support the aim of this legislation, which is to give the Parliamentary Budget Officer greater independence so that he might properly carry out his mandate, and so with the expectation that Bill C-572 will not require royal recommendation, I am pleased to support this legislation at second reading so it may be studied at committee.