Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to speak today to Bill C-476 introduced by the Leader of the Opposition. This bill would make the Parliamentary Budget Officer an officer of Parliament separate from and independent of the government, just like the Auditor General, the Chief Electoral Officer and the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner.
The first Parliamentary Budget Officer took office in 2008. His mandate is to provide Parliament with independent analysis of the state of the nation's finances, the government estimates and trends in the national economy and, at the request of any parliamentary committee or parliamentarian, to estimate the cost of any proposal that relates to a matter over which Parliament has jurisdiction.
In fact, the Office of the Parliamentary Budget Officer is replete with economists, tax experts, accountants and other experts in public accounting and economic forecasting. Their mandate is to provide neutral and professional advice to parliamentarians who can thus properly analyze the government's expenditures. The Globe and Mail hit the nail on the head when it described the usefulness of the Parliamentary Budget Officer in the following terms:
With better information to scrutinize the financial decisions of the government the PBO enhances the ability of Parliamentarians to hold the government to account. Moreover, the PBO provides a source of credible cost estimates for new initiatives proposed by Parliamentarians, allowing them to contribute more to policy debates. The government has the vast and deep resources of the Ministry of Finance for these tasks; the PBO helps Parliament keep pace.
Since this position was created, the Parliamentary Budget Officer has done extraordinary work and has called into question the Conservatives' budget projections, in spite of the fact that he was not given all the tools he needed to do his job properly.
Let us not forget that during the 2008 election campaign, at the height of the war in Afghanistan, the government refused to provide the real cost of the military mission and the Parliamentary Budget Officer revealed that the cost of this war was much higher than we had thought. Kevin Page, the Parliamentary Budget Officer, determined that the war in Afghanistan was going to cost Canadians $18 billion. This clearly shows how important the Parliamentary Budget Officer is to the strength of our democracy. Without the information provided by Kevin Page on the cost of the war in Afghanistan, voters would have had to vote for a government without knowing all the facts about a fundamental public policy.
Let us also remember that Kevin Page released a very important report in March 2011, in which he concluded that the Conservative government was deliberately underestimating the cost of the F-35 fighter jets. While the Minister of National Defence claimed that the 65 F-35s would cost only $14.7 billion, the Parliamentary Budget Officer estimated that the bill would come to over $29 billion. That important report forced the Conservative government to go back to the drawing board.
We could also mention the report that Kevin Page released in February 2012 on old age security. While the Conservatives claimed that they had to raise the retirement age from 65 to 67 to deal with the retirement of the baby boomers, the Parliamentary Budget Officer found that the federal government had exaggerated the expected financial crisis and that the old age security program was actually completely sustainable.
The Conservatives were very upset about these three reports on Afghanistan, the F-35s and the sustainability of the old age security program. They even went after the former Parliamentary Budget Officer because he repeatedly pointed out their poor fiscal management.
I hope that I have shown just how important it is to have an independent Parliamentary Budget Officer who can force the government to be accountable to MPs and the Canadians it represents.