This is arguably one of the top public policy concerns facing our country right now. Our job as parliamentarians is to assess the adequacy of policies that are in place to address one of the top public policy concerns in our country right now. It is difficult to do that without data or finding data well behind the things. The assertion that somehow it would be a risk for parliamentarians to be working with the same data that the officials have, Mr. Chair, I actually find an affront to democracy. When the minister stands up in the House and says “we've spent all this money” or “we've got this task force“, yet we have no data, I can't get the minutes of meetings, and I can't do anything, then how am I supposed to do my job? The reality is that if they're not getting this data fast enough, then the government needs to be pushing them to do something better because if we're not understanding the problem, how can we even fix it? How can you go to the Americans and negotiate? I just find this whole premise ridiculous. We should be receiving this information, imperfect or whatnot, as soon as we can so that we can.... This is my file. This is what I've been tasked with as the official opposition and I don't have the data to be able to do this. It's ridiculous.
