Madam Speaker, I thank the hon. member for Barrie—Innisfil for the excellent work he is doing as chair of the ethics committee, which has been working overtime these last number of months to root out scandal and corruption.
He talks about the decline in democracy and the challenges that we as parliamentarians face in getting information. The concept of “open by default”, that we should be able to see the documents and the information on what this government is doing, is laughable now after over eight years.
The ATIP system is broken. We see examples of years upon years of individuals waiting to get what should be fairly simple documents from the government. We see committees being given the runaround when requesting fairly simple information. We see this across the board in all aspects of parliamentary life, where parliamentarians, who are sent here to do their jobs, are unable to do them because of the lack of information.
Open by default, eight and a half years later, is now closed by default. We are not getting the information that we need, as parliamentarians, to do our job.