Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for his question and the hard work by his party and all members on the government operations and estimates committee.
Any comment on this would of course be speculative, but we can check the record. We do know that the government does not embrace transparency, in spite of having created the position of the Parliamentary Budget Officer, for example, when it was a minority government.
I believe in all good conscience that the individual members of the Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates embraced these recommendations as part of the consensus decision, because they truly believed they would improve our work as parliamentarians. However, the government as a whole does not seem to embrace transparency. Witness, for example, the Parliamentary Budget Officer having to go to court to get information and the difficulty we have had as individual parliamentarians in finding out basic information from budget decisions, including what programs have been cut, what programs are going to be funded and what the impact of the decisions will be. It is a very unfortunate message to send to Canadians that somehow the government does not trust them to share information with them. That is a sad message.