moved:
That this House call for the establishment of an independent commission of inquiry into the mismanagement of grants and contributions in the Department of Human Resources Development, and into any attempts to control the disclosure of this mismanagement to the public.
Mr. Speaker, I am not entirely happy that this motion had to be brought forward today. I would have hoped after all these weeks that the government would have been able to provide clear and satisfactory answers to the very difficult and troubling situation in the human resources department, the largest department of government. The department handles huge amounts of public money, up to $60 billion a year. It handles by far the most public money of any department. It is a department which is more focused than almost any other on meeting the needs of Canadians in theory and in principle, but unfortunately not in deed.
Our motion today calls for the establishment of an independent inquiry into the mismanagement of grants and contributions by this department and also, unfortunately and sadly, attempts to control the disclosure of this mismanagement to the public.
We first called for an independent inquiry on February 8 in a letter from the Leader of the Official Opposition to the Auditor General of Canada. Since then there have been repeated calls from the opposition and the public for an independent inquiry, as very troubling discrepancies and lack of full disclosure continued to surface.
There are three reasons we believe an independent inquiry is necessary. The first reason is that enormous public interests are at stake. The grants and contributions program in HRDC spends over $3 billion a year. That is $3 billion which is hard earned by Canadians and taken from their pockets by the government. That is $3 billion which could be spent on a variety of initiatives that are of importance to Canadians, including health care, but this money is not spent on those types of things. That $3 billion really represents the tip of the iceberg because almost every other government department has grants and contributions spending totalling over $13 billion each and every year. That is $13 billion which is not available to Canadians for other priorities.
This is not a small matter when it comes to the public interest. An independent inquiry is very necessary if the public interest is not being well served by the grants and contributions management and programs.
The second reason we believe there needs to be an independent inquiry is to restore trust in parliament and in the institutions of government.
Even the Liberal surveys are now showing that government mismanagement of public money is looming large in the public concern. There has been a serious and troubling erosion of the public's trust and confidence in the way their money, their affairs and their interests are being managed and looked after by the government, and, by extension, all of us in the House of Commons who were elected to serve the public, to manage their affairs and to act in their best interests. The public is clearly questioning, and rightly so, whether their interests are being protected, cared for and looked after. They have a right to have their questions laid to rest.
The third reason we believe an independent inquiry is needed is because there is a long and unfortunately growing list of fundamental unanswered questions and discrepancies without full disclosure of relevant information. To be blunt, there is an information management strategy on the part of government to withhold, to cover and to keep full information and full disclosure about the situation not only from members of the House, but the public. There have been many examples and instances of that.
I could give a very full and comprehensive history of what has happened in HRDC. Unfortunately, my time does not allow it. However, my colleagues and others in the opposition will be bringing forward many of those concerns today.
In the time I have, I would like to focus on the withholding of very basic information about the mismanagement of grants and contributions in HRDC and why that is so troubling. I would like to emphasize that the audit which uncovered this terrible situation had the most damning rundown of statistics about the lack of controls and safeguards on the spending of public money in that department.
To name two figures: in 80% of the projects files there was no financial tracking of public money released into the hands of grant recipients; in 87% of the files there was no supervision of the projects. Any auditor or any common sense person would tell us that when there is no oversight, no controls, no safeguards, no supervision of the way money is spent, the potential and the actual likelihood of fraud, abuse and misspending is very high. There have been many instances which have come to light, in spite of the choke hold the government has placed on access to information requests and other documents, to show that this is in fact what happened.
This audit has not been a new phenomenon. On June 14 the interim audit results were presented to the department.