Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for his initiative and for the speech he gave at the beginning of the debate on this Senate bill, which has three very worthwhile objectives. I am pleased that my Conservative colleague has joined the movement to call for more transparency within the Canada Revenue Agency, to calculate the tax gap and to share information with the Parliamentary Budget Officer.
However, since my colleague is a Conservative, I would like him to shed some light on what happened between the time when the Conservatives were in power and today. The Parliamentary Budget Officer fought long and hard to get this data and finally managed to get a positive response from the current government. However, he had to threaten to take the government to court to get it, particularly because Mr. Harper's Conservative government absolutely did not want to provide him with that information.
Can my colleague tell me what happened since the time when Mr. Harper's Conservative government was in power? Why are today's Conservatives proposing this initiative?