Mr. Speaker, the NDP will be supporting the motion by the member for Kings—Hants.
Like him, I am a member of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Finance, and like him, I was outraged at the Conservative government's attempts to hide behind the false argument of cabinet confidence.
Just as the member for Kings—Hants was a minister, I was a minister for a number of years in the National Assembly of Quebec, which has the same strict parliamentary rules for cabinet discussions. However, in this case, it is completely beside the point.
We often make the mistake of taking our institutions for granted. Today's courageous decision was made by a Speaker who has sat in the chair for longer than any other Speaker in Canadian history and who is such a unanimous choice that he has now served twice under a government led by a party other than his own. That is the quality of the Speaker we have.
In his courageous decision today, he again stood up for the defence of our institutions, as he did before Christmas, when it was revealed that the staffer of a Conservative member of Parliament, for his own purposes, sent out a confidential report of the same finance committee to a bunch of lobbyists to curry favour with them. That issue was also declared to be a question of confidence, and it is now before another committee. I cannot say more about that.
However, this is a pattern of behaviour that we are starting to see on the part of the Conservatives, a pattern of behaviour that seeks to undermine, to suborn and to damage our parliamentary institutions. With brazen arrogance, they replied that they no longer had to tell Parliament how much things would cost. One of the basic rules of the House is that we get to decide how money is spent. That is one of the most basic things we do here.
The government has the obligation to provide Parliament with information. The hypocrisy of this is the Conservatives were the ones who boasted they would bring in more accountability. They said that they would create an independent authority called the Parliamentary Budget Officer. They shackled him once by saying that he was a subaltern of the parliamentary librarian. Then we found out he was not even going to be able to get his full budget, so he could not hold on to his best staff. Then we found out that, like us, he could not even have access to real information that would allow members of Parliament to do their jobs. This is all about that.
This is about allowing Parliament to perform one of its most fundamental roles: holding the government to account in terms of how it spends public money.
It is not the first time we have seen the Conservatives behave like this, but it is becoming a pattern of behaviour and it is time for the members of the House to stand up to the Conservatives and say “enough”, that they are not going to trammel on our obligations and rights or our ability to get our jobs done in the public interest anymore. This is a fundamental role of Parliament and our democracy.
We again congratulate the member for Kings—Hants for bringing the motion and the Speaker for his courageous ruling. The NDP will be there four square voting for it and working on it to try to have the rights of this institution respected by the Conservative government.