Mr. Speaker, I am delighted to join in the debate this morning, although I have to say that I regret that I have to do so.
Today the House of Commons will be spending a full day of activity considering a motion that there should be a full public inquiry into the grants and contributions matter at HRDC when only last week the largest standing committee in the House of Commons tabled a report in the House based on hearings begun in January.
I do not think it would be possible for the House to conduct more open and full public hearings for four or five months than has taken place on this matter.
Responding, for example, to opposition requests, virtually every one of those public hearings, only in the sense, as are all our committees, that records were kept and published, but they were also televised and run on several occasions in real time on more than two channels, in every case run more than once following the closing of the House of Commons itself, and ran a full four or five months of public inquiry.
I would say that the vast majority of witnesses who appeared before that committee, and given the time constraints we certainly met with many witnesses from various parts of the country, were there at the request of the opposition members of the committee. All parties were able to submit lists. We went through as many of those lists as was possible. The majority of people were opposition witnesses.
Going back to this public inquiry that we have just finished, I have to say that it attracted an enormous amount of public attention. I cannot imagine a public inquiry that could have received more coverage on the front page of newspapers, on the editorial pages of newspapers, as the first issue in television and radio newscasts and so on.
Here we are debating whether there should be a full and independent inquiry on something which is very important, but to which parliament has already allocated an enormous amount of time.
In one way today's motion can be looked at, and people watching this debate can say “Oh yes, they are looking for a full and public inquiry into another of these great big government departments”. By the way, I am one who is of the view that HRDC unfortunately, now we can tell after some years, is too large and too diverse. However, this debate is not about that.
This $1.3 billion worth of grants and contributions goes out to thousands of individuals and organizations who work in all our communities. These are organizations that are devoted to literacy at the community level and to the full inclusion of disabled persons in our society. These are organizations that are involved with the training and retraining of people in the workforce, young people, older workers, disabled people and so on. These are groups that help to rehabilitate persons who have been released from prison and help get them back into the workforce. These are the sorts of things we are actually debating today.
We are not debating a full public inquiry into a very large government department. That inquiry has just been completed.
Witness after witness in the full public hearings that we held warned us. By the way, these were not simply social do-gooders or people like that. They were people who understood the importance of the proper management of files and money. Knowing needs of the organizations I have just tried to describe, they warned us about overcompensation.
The expression overcompensation kept recurring. What they meant by that was that we should, by all means, get fully to the bottom of the serious mismanagement of those files, but that we should also put in place better systems for the future to ensure that the organizations, which, in partnership with other areas of funding support, depend on this type of funding, are not put at risk.
One of the large national organizations for rehabilitation which deals with the rights of disabled people told us that it was close to being bankrupt, not because it depended entirely on the federal purse but that the federal contributions that it received allowed it to go out and get matching funds elsewhere. The reason its funds are not flowing at this time is not that there is something wrong with its file, but that there is so much concern in HRDC about these inquiries, which have been going on for five months, that overcare is being taken and the funds are not flowing.
When these inquiries began in January and February, as soon as I possibly could I arranged for the full list of HRDC grants and contributions in my riding to be published in our main daily newspaper and in our main bi-weekly newspaper. I have to say that once I did that, my phone stopped ringing on this issue. It was not that the people in my riding were not concerned about HRDC moneys being properly managed. It was not that at all. They knew that we were engaging in a very full and public inquiry.
Once those people saw which organizations we were dealing with, such as the Trent Valley Literacy Association, the Housing Resource Centre and the Emergency Preparedness Organization in Peterborough which watches out for future problems like the ice storm, they said to themselves that, yes, there was improper handling of these government files but that they would wait to see what the House of Commons would to do about it. In the meantime, they knew that these were not the sorts of organizations that would rip off the taxpayers of Canada.
I would suggest that while we go through what I believe is a wasted day of debate—and, yes, it is right that we look at federal departments all the time—that today's debate is about those organizations that deal with things such as literacy, apprenticeship, pre-apprenticeship, employment programs, entrepreneurial programs and things of that type.
I want to point out to hon. members that the full public inquiry completed last week tabled a report which I have here. It contains 30 detailed recommendations dealing with what the department is doing, what the department should do with respect to grants and contributions and what Treasury Board is doing.
I am glad to see that treasury board has already released new guidelines for across the federal system on grants and contributions and on what should be done. The committee looks forward to the auditor general's report, another report which my colleague just mentioned, which will be coming out in a few months.
The committee itself is committed to revisiting this issue. We have recommendations which suggest that the system can be improved, that the tracking of grants can be more effectively carried out without slowing or reducing the flexibility at the grassroots where we are dealing with thousands of small organizations.
We suggest the idea of an advisory committee in the ridings, which would be comprised of citizens who would deal with the larger grants, where the grants deal with the private sector. We think that would help.
We have suggestions with respect to third party accountability. Remember, the federal government delivers these grants, in some cases with provincial governments and in some cases with not for profit organizations. There are various partners. Those partners have to be accountable, as well as the federal government, and we have recommendations for that.
We are glad that HRDC has completed its review of the active files and will now proceed to deal with the closed files.
This is about HRDC, yes, but much more significantly it is about human resources development in a real sense; how we develop the fantastic human resources of 30 million Canadians. I oppose the idea of yet another review of this matter. As the chair of the committee, along with my colleagues on the committee, I commit myself to following through on the report which the committee has tabled in the most thorough fashion.