Mr. Speaker, since this may be my last opportunity to speak in the House before rising for the Christmas break, I want to give you my best wishes for the holiday season. I also want to say a special thank you to everyone who has made our jobs easier this past session: the table officers, the pages, the interpreters, the security personnel, the messengers, the food providers and everyone who made it possible for us to do our jobs.
Those thanks are particularly in order since this has been such a raucous session, with so many uncertainties about the legislative agenda of the government and with so much division and conflict around deepening scandals and information about fiscal mismanagement.
We have expressed in the past and we will again today our concern with the government's ability to manage fiscally and to provide a meaningful legislative agenda for Parliament and for the country. To use an old expression, I think it can be said that the debates this session have been a bit like the mating of pandas. There has been a lot of commotion but not much has happened.
It is very important, in this period of prebudgetary consultations, that we discuss the question of accountability and transparency. It is very hard to give concrete suggestions around budgetary alternatives if we know before we even start that so many of our recommendations will be disregarded, and where there are so many questions and doubts about how the government is actually spending the money that we authorized in the Chamber in the past.
In the last few weeks we have had ample evidence from the Auditor General, through the media and from other sources indicating that the government is suffering from three phenomena that are very worrisome.
First, there is clearly a culture of secrecy that runs rampant through the government.
Second, there is an arrogance of power that makes the government believe it can keep important decisions away from Parliament.
Third, there also is evidence of rotten management of public funds, of taxpayer dollars, whether we are talking about the Auditor General's revelations with respect to the billion dollar gun registry; or we are talking about the billion dollars plus in terms of GST fraud; or we are talking about the Auditor General's revelations pertaining to the corporate use of tax havens, which has cost millions of dollars; or we are talking about the recent news of a $20 million expenditure to build a refugee jail or a fortress for people coming into Canada seeking immigration status or refugee asylum.
Example after example reveal that the government is secretive, unaccountable to the public and disrespectful of Parliament.
I hope, as we lead up to the process of the next budget, the government will take those concerns very seriously, start acting on those concerns and will truly try to find ways to become accountable to Parliament and transparent with the public.
The Auditor General made a suggestion that the problems were not all a result of government mismanagement, that MPs themselves were derelict in their duties in terms of active scrutiny of government expenditures. I think the Auditor General has a point but only to a certain extent. That argument only holds true if members of Parliament and the committees of the House are given the opportunity and the information to adequately scrutinize government expenditures.
I know of numerous standing committees of the House that were not given the opportunity to scrutinize the supplementary estimates. As per our rules, those estimates were deemed accepted and approved even though there was no debate and no scrutiny by the many committees.
That is not a problem of individual members of Parliament. That is a result of a government that wields authority throughout this place and which has very cleverly managed to ensure that by controlling the membership and the actions of its own members on committees it makes it impossible for us to do our jobs.
I want to say that was absolutely the case in terms of both the health committee and the immigration committee, two committees of which I am a part. Neither of those committees studied the supplementary estimates and therefore no recommendations are coming forward, even though we are talking about two large areas of government expenditure and two areas where there are questionable practices on the part of government.
I will reference the health committee. This is a committee that ought to be having a say in this prebudgetary period and ought to be discussing the implications of the royal commission by Roy Romanow on the future of health care, and yet our committee adjourned yesterday immediately upon completing the study of Bill C-13. No attempt was made to schedule meetings pertaining to Romanow, despite a motion being passed at that committee to do just that.
We did not have a chance to scrutinize the department's budgets, even though we heard, through media sources and community activists, that the government was up to some dubious practices. I want to reference for the benefit of the House some evidence suggesting that the Minister of Health is planning to raid tobacco control funding to pay for other health initiatives. It would appear that the Minister of Health is preparing to take $13 million out of the anti-smoking initiative and putting it, as we understand it, into her study on obesity to meet her requirements to study the issue of obesity in Canada today.
No scrutiny in this place occurred around those initiatives. I would suggest that the problem rests with the secrecy and manipulation of the government and not with the integrity and hard work of individual members of Parliament on all sides of the House.
I also want to reference the immigration committee where we also did not deal with the supplementary estimates. We learned through the media that the government has proceeded with tendering for a contract worth $20 million to build a detention centre in the vicinity of Pearson airport. The detention centre has specifications that appear to make it a fortress and a jail for refugees, not a low risk security centre.
At the same time that we hear of the government proceeding with that with no accountability to our committee, we know the minister of immigration is saying that he does not have the money, the courage or whatever to implement the refugee appeal division aspects of the immigration and refugee legislation passed by the House. We have legislation passed by the House and the minister says that he cannot proclaim parts of the bill to ensure due process and rights for refugees because he does not have the money, yet he has the money for a prison for refugees.
It also should be noted that there are many areas where the immigration minister should be spending money to ensure family reunification in this country but he has failed to do that. I want to reference in particular the fact that the immigration department has tremendous backlogs in many areas, particularly in terms of family reunification and sponsorship of spouses. We know that the waiting time for just basic acknowledgment and initial approval used to be 90 days. It is now well over eight months or even up to a year.
Here we are talking about prebudgetary consultations when the government is not prepared to be forthcoming. It is ignoring the wishes of Parliament.
Finally, with respect to health care, it is clear that the government has the resources, the latitude and the will of Canadians to move forward with the expenditures recommended by Roy Romanow. We are talking about a reasonable proposal that will ensure stability in our system. It will give the kind of involvement by the federal government to ensure that the provinces and the federal government can participate on a cooperative basis for the future.
I would suggest that the government has no legitimacy in suggesting that the cupboard is bare and that it cannot address the number one priority of Canadians. I would suggest to the government that it commit today to including in the next budget the expenditures recommended by Romanow so we can ensure a sustainable future for medicare.