Parliament is being asked to vote on a major crime bill without a clear idea of how much it could cost taxpayers, Canada's budget watchdog said Tuesday.

The Conservative government's secrecy is hampering parliamentarians' ability to evaluate new legislation, Kevin Page told a House of Commons committee.

He said MPs are losing their ability to perform their constitutionally mandated jobs because of the lack of information available about the cost of new bills.

"There is a genuine concern that Parliament is losing control of its fiduciary responsibilities of approving financial authorities of public monies as afforded in the Constitution," he said.

Page said that MPs are being asked to approve the government's new crime bill "without financial information or knowledge of monies set aside."

The government has refused a request from the Commons finance committee to release detailed costs estimates for its crime bills.

"We are suffering from some lack of transparency with respect to Parliament," Page told CTV's Power Play Tuesday. "The trend on transparency has been negative. We need more transparency, not less and this is something that needs to be debated and corrected." Page has previously estimated that just one of the Tories' crime bills could hike prison costs by $5 billion over five years.

But the Tories say all their crime bills will only add $2 billion in prison costs over five years.

"We've seen almost nothing on crime bills . . . we need to do much better," Page said.

On Tuesday, Page seemed to offer tacit support to the Liberals motion to have the government found to be in contempt of parliament for refusing to release their data, saying the information has been released in the past.

"In my 25 years of public service ... this type of information is regularly exchanged amongst officials. In fact, our projections, our assumptions does include information on wages and salaries and corporate profits," he said.

The Conservative members of the finance committee accused Page of leaking information to the media and of being biased against the government.

"There's a fair amount of politics in your statement today," Tory MP Mike Wallace said.

"You are willing to comment on a motion from this committee on economic information from departments we've declared cabinet confidentiality is an issue, but you don't comment on private members' bills ... not funded."

But Wallace seemed to agree with Page about the lack of information.

"I do agree with you that we are losing a little bit of control here, but is it your mandate to comment, or is it something we need to do?"

Liberal finance critic Scott Briso attacked the government over the secrecy, saying previous governments had no issues releasing it.

"The government's excuses are unbelievable," he said.

On Ottawa's budget, Page believes the government will post a deficit of under $40 billion this year, about $5 billion less than Finance Minister Jim Flaherty's latest projection.

But Page and the government disagree about whether Ottawa can balance its budget in the next five years.

"We're still talking about a structural deficit that we need to deal with," he said.

With files from The Canadian Press