Madam Speaker, I was of course reading from correspondence sent by my constituents. Some of them did point out that they felt there had been no proper accounting for the money.
Roughly $13 billion a year are given out in grants and contributions. Has a billion dollars gone missing? I cannot answer that because there has not been proper accounting. So many things have been done improperly that in fact we do not know what has really happened with the money.
Asking me to account for what certainly the member himself cannot account for, because there has been improper safekeeping of taxpayer money, is an odd thing to ask. I think the member ought to ask the Minister of Human Resources Development, the minister responsible for this department, and the ministers responsible for the other departments that make up this $13 billion in spending. Hopefully, they will eventually arrive at the truth.
This independent public inquiry, a commission, would certainly go a long way to at least answering the questions with regard to the human resources department. Those are the answers we are looking for and those are the types of questions to which Canadians want answers.