Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the hon. member for Brandon—Souris.
It is with pleasure today that I speak on this votable supply motion which will effectively encourage and instil a greater sense of accountability in this place. I think it is extremely important that we should expect from governments at least the same level of accountability, and I would suggest an even greater level of financial accountability that we expect from private corporations. Private corporations and publicly traded corporations require through the auditing process a greater level of accountability in terms of their bookkeeping and the auditing of their statements than in fact this government seems to deem appropriate.
There has been a secular decline in the role of the private member since the late 1960s. Commensurate with that there has been an increased amount of power in the cabinet and ultimately in the PMO. As such, there has been a reduction in the level of parliamentary scrutiny over spending and again starting in the late 1960s.
I would argue it would benefit all members of the House and all Canadians, regardless of political affiliation, if we were to restore greater levels of parliamentary accountability over spending.
There was a time when the estimates for departments were debated here in the House of Commons, scrutinized by committee of the whole. I would propose, as we did in the PC party's prebudget position last year, that we should restore a system which would provide the ability for parliament to actually scrutinize the estimates of a certain number of departments each year in the House of Commons without a time limit. This would ensure that first, the minister has to be very aware of what is going on within his or her department, but also that Canadians who are paying among the highest taxes, business and personal taxes, in the industrialized world, will be ensured that their money—again, it is their money, it is not the government's money—is being invested or spent in ways that are consistent with the goals and the aims of Canadian taxpayers.
Whether one agrees or disagrees with the nature of some of the government spending is immaterial in some ways. What is most important, and what the motion speaks to, is that whatever government spending occurs the government is held accountable through an audit process that is open, transparent and clear to Canadians on an ongoing basis to show that the government is maintaining taxpayer money in a way that is appropriate.
The PC Party is supporting the motion. The accountability issue is critical. We should not have to go through what we went through in recent weeks with the HRDC debacle in trying as members of parliament to get information that should have been available openly, transparently and instantly, and then having the dissemination of an immense amount of information in one day, to the extent that it almost became impossible to absorb and deal with it in an effective way. This kind of information should be available on an ongoing basis and all Canadians would benefit from it.
The motion addresses some of the issues from the perspective of parliamentary involvement in this very important area of spending, but we would like to see parliament move further in this direction. We would like to see the restoration of the right to debate the estimates in the House of Commons and in committee of the whole, which would provide greater levels of scrutiny over the spending of taxpayer money. This would also increase the role of the private member whether that member was sitting on the backbenches of the Liberal government or on the opposition benches. It would benefit all of us.
In these times of hyper competitiveness on the global stage when taxes are comparatively higher in Canada than they are for our trading partners, we must recognize it becomes doubly important that taxpayer money be spent in such a way that Canadians are aware of where the money is being spent. The government should take very seriously its fiduciary role in maintaining the proper levels of financial procedural control over these investments.
The motion goes in the right direction, but we should also reconsider the involvement of government departments. Prior to the HRDC scandal I was not aware of the degree to which the government was clearly involved in projects that it should not have been involved in. I was naive enough to believe that a lot of the pork barrelling and use of taxpayer money to buy support in an election had subsided. I thought we were in a new age and that all parties in the House recognized the importance of creating sound economic policies and environments to create economic growth.
Direct government involvement in investing in some of these businesses may have been considered less important or less effective than it would have been at one point. I saw some of the most egregious examples of government spending with HRDC. I think $500,000 were given to Wal-Mart to build a store that it would have built anyway. I forget the exact sum but I believe $300,000 were given to a company to move 30 kilometres from one member's riding to a minister's riding.
Some of these examples smack of the type of old style politics of which Canadians have been skeptical. They have lost faith in governments and institutions. Any structure we could put in place to ensure greater levels of procedural accountability and audit accountability would be very positive.
We in the PC Party are supporting the motion. We hope it is just one of a number of steps that we can take to create in a multi-partisan or non-partisan way greater levels of accountability and scrutiny over taxpayer money in parliament.