Thanks very much.
The fact that the Minister of Finance will not appear goes very much to the role of Parliament. The role of Parliament since the time of the Magna Carta has been to hold the government responsible, and those in the opposition parties have a sacrosanct responsibility. Even when their attempts are ignored, just brazenly sloughed off as if the voice of the people were not important, it doesn't mean that Parliament should go away. In fact, it's just the opposite: Parliament should double its efforts when the government is being non-transparent and refusing to be held accountable.
I will say that NDP leaders of the past, such as Tommy Douglas and Jack Layton, would never have allowed the government to simply be unaccountable. They would never have just given up and gone home. In fact, I might even say to the member from the NDP, “Why not make it part of the supply and confidence agreement that the Minister of Finance should actually respond to committee invitations?”
The NDP has made a large deal in the press in saying that committees will operate independently, irrespective of the supply and confidence agreement. Why not prove that this is the truth? Act independently. Let's all do our duties. The Bloc Québécois, the Conservative Party—we're doing our duty. We are attempting to hold the government in power to account. We are trying to speak truth to power; in fact, we are speaking truth to power.
We have had a very non-partisan, very vanilla motion for the Minister of Finance to come for 90 minutes, at a time when we just heard the Liberal member saying that we're in extremely difficult, perilous economic times and that Canadians are struggling. We're asking for the Minister of Finance to come, and I might say that it's in the background of a recent cabinet shuffle. On that note, I don't believe we even have a parliamentary secretary for finance as of yet. Not only do we have a Minister of Finance who's unwilling to speak to us, but we also don't even have a parliamentary secretary yet.
By the way, my congratulations go to Mr. Beech in joining cabinet.
Despite disagreeing on many ideological grounds, I would expect that the party of Jack Layton and the party of Tommy Douglas would stand with the Conservatives, and in this case with the Bloc Québécois as well, in holding the government to account and asking the Minister of Finance to appear, rather than simply throwing up their hands and saying, “Well, it didn't work before.” Let's not give up. Let's hold the Minister of Finance accountable. Let's hold the Deputy Prime Minister to account.
Unless other colleagues have other comments they'd like to make, I would like to see this go to a vote so that we can see which parties believe in accountability and, quite frankly, which parties want this committee to be functional as we put forward a very reasonable motion and are even willing to amend it and water it down for the benefit of the committee, and see as well which parties don't believe in accountability.