Mr. Speaker, I am glad my colleagues share with their energy and enthusiasm that vision of tomorrow.
What has the government done instead of that vision, instead of investing in those kinds of things that Canadians need and want? It has thrown away tens of billions of dollars on the F-35s and on prisons. Here is where it is cutting. I mentioned Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development, but let us move on to the agents of Parliament.
The Auditor General of Canada is a position that has so much respect across the county. The Auditor General is the person who actually identifies when there is misspending and protects the taxpayers' interest, protects Canadians' interest. To do that, the Auditor General needs the resources to undertake the audits that auditors do.
I mentioned on Friday that before I was elected to Parliament I ran a social enterprise. We won a couple of business excellence awards; I am very proud of that. In running that enterprise, making sure that we were making payroll for over 50 employees, we made sure that we had careful auditing of all of our expenditures. We were providing services to the deaf and hard of hearing communities. We were providing a full range of goods as well. We had a store across the province and a virtual store as well. We were selling equipment. We were providing services. All of it was on a fee-for-service basis. I am very proud of that. I am very proud of the record of that social enterprise.
We made sure that as we balanced that budget and as we moved forward we paid down some debts as well. We were debt free by the time I finished there, before I was elected to Parliament. We made sure that we had auditors carefully evaluating every single step of the way. That is how it is done. I am a financial administrator. That is my background. There has to be those impartial auditors looking over things, making sure there is a maximization of the effectiveness of the investments.
The Auditor General does that for the nation. The NDP has always said that the Auditor General needs more resources to audit effectively more of the expenses of government. If the government had been listening to the Auditor General, it never would have gotten into the F-35 fiasco in the first place. It would not have blown tens of billions of dollars on the F-35s.
If the government had done that careful evaluation with the Auditor General, it never would have gotten into this misguided prisons agenda. The Auditor General would have said, “Hold on, you do not have the budget. You do not know how much it is going to cost. You have to be a little more rigorous in your cost accounting on the prisons. You cannot just throw legislation before the House of Commons and do it in such an irresponsible way”.
If the Conservatives had done that with the Auditor General, they would not have seen what they have seen over the last few months, which has been a steady erosion in public confidence in the government's ability to handle money.
What the Conservatives should do is learn from the New Democrats. I have mentioned a couple of times the annual fiscal returns that are done by the federal Ministry of Finance, and there are not a lot of NDP members hanging out there. Annually for 20 years the federal Ministry of Finance has done an evaluation of NDP governments compared to Conservative governments, Liberal governments and governments of other parties. The NDP governments, for 20 years running, year after year, have come out number one in terms of balancing budgets, managing money and paying down debt, number one in the nation every year.
We are number one in the nation. The Liberals are not even close. I think they are fifth. They are worse than the Social Credit Party and the Parti Québécois. The Conservatives simply are not as good as the NDP, because the Conservatives erode the public institutions that are supposed to do the monitoring. As I said, when I ran my social enterprise, the auditors have to be involved at every stage to make sure that we are maximizing those investments.
What has the government done with respect to the Auditor General of Canada? If what the government really intends to do is to try to save some money, but if it is being spent effectively, one would assume we would see an increase in the budget for the Auditor General of Canada. That just makes common sense. The government should not cut back on its monitoring agency. It should do the opposite and invest more, because that monitoring agency can help save the government further money down the road.