Mr. Speaker, precisely because the Parliamentary Budget Officer refuses to blindly parrot the talking points of the Conservatives, of course, Kevin Page was attacked, but the Conservatives are not much happier with the interim Parliamentary Budget Officer, who is using the court decision to compel them to produce those documents.
With regard to the failure of the austerity measures of the Conservatives, let us bear in mind that contrary to what they affirmed when they first brought out their budget and were trying to get people to believe that they would increase spending on infrastructure, it took 48 hours to prove the point, as we had said from the beginning, that they were actually reducing it. Now everybody realizes that we were right. However, the Conservatives are particularly able at trying to snow people. Sometimes if enough numbers are thrown up, a number of people can be baffled.
Once the dust has settled on that exercise, though, people realize the importance of a Parliamentary Budget Officer in seeing through that type of snow job from the Conservatives, so that no parliamentarian in the future would ever have to be at the beck and call of a government that refuses to give the real numbers.
We want to strengthen the office of the Parliamentary Budget Officer, create a parliamentary budget office and make sure it is protected by Parliament.