Mr. Speaker, early in the member's intervention he talked about how we brought in the independent Parliamentary Budget Office, as if somehow he had something to do with that. It should be noted for the record that the Liberals voted against that, and now he wants to take credit for it. Let us give credit where credit is due.
In his intervention and throughout his questions, he kept talking about parliamentary budget offices around the world being similar without actually talking about them contextually. I mentioned earlier that the UK parliamentary budget office is housed in the treasury department. In the United States it serves Congress. Every parliamentary budget office in the world is connected to the branch of government that formulates the budget, and in parliamentary systems that should be connected to the government, not to the Parliament. In Canada, the Parliamentary Budget Office is connected to the Library of Parliament for independence, not to the executive branch.
Is the member saying that every parliamentary budget office and comparable office in the world is somehow not independent, including Canada's?