Mr. Speaker, as my colleague was talking about the issue, the word that popped into my mind was “hypocrisy”. That might be an applicable term in the particular situation as he described, which I thought was a fair assessment. When we have the Parliamentary Budget Officer asking for more transparency and accountability and the government saying no, there are some problems with consistency.
There are many examples we could use but I will use the $16 orange juice example, which is a relatively inexpensive one. However, we could go to the other extreme. How many of us are familiar with the F-35? We are talking about billions of dollars in this case and the government does not provide any information that is credible or legitimate to the public. We still do not know how much or how many F-35s we are talking about. Those are basic questions and yet the government has failed to be accountable on that issue and has failed to be transparent in terms of what has been done on that particular file where we are talking about billions of dollars.
I think there is a lot room for improvement with this bill, especially if the government wants to be consistent in what it would oblige our first nations to do.