I've been listening with great interest to my honourable colleagues. Mr. Butt is new on our committee, new to Parliament, I believe. I just don't want him to misunderstand. When we were dealing with the commissioner coming before us, which was...what was it, we were talking about vexatious and frivolous, the motion brought forward by Mr. Del Mastro, and she told him there was nothing of substance.
But that's not the issue. The reason we didn't ask the Ethics Commissioner any questions about Mr. Clement was that we were not bringing a letter to her; we were bringing it to our committee. She's independent, an independent officer of Parliament. We, our committee, are the masters of our own house. That is the way the parliamentary process works.
So I'm bringing this to committee here, and as I said, we need to bring it here for a couple of key reasons. After 112 days of being in the doghouse, I know Mr. Clement has announced he's going to go to the public accounts committee and he's going to bring as many people with him as possible. The issue of accounts is separate from the issue I'm speaking about. We know that the $50 million fund was only a small part of the money that was funnelled into Muskoka through numerous programs under Mr. Clement's watch in the lead-up to the G-8. The amount of money is much higher, over $100 million. Most of those programs haven't been audited.
I think certainly there's a role for the public accounts committee to address that, but the public accounts committee doesn't address the ethical breaches, the fact that secret meetings were held in the middle of an election with senior bureaucrats attending. Senior bureaucrats of the Canadian government took the time in the middle of an election to participate in meetings where minutes were kept about a fund that didn't exist, and then when the Auditor General went looking to find out, that significant meeting was left out. The Auditor General wasn't given that piece of paper. When the key bureaucrats who participated in meetings all the way along were given the opportunity through their departments to explain their role, none of that information was handed to the Auditor General. So there was a question about what happened.
It's an ethical question. It's not a public accounts question; it's an ethical question as to what happened when members were brought in from bureaucracies who told local mayors in these private meetings to set the criteria they wanted for the funds and then they'd distribute them among themselves. That is a complete breach of any protocol that's ever been established in a credible western democracy. Yet this was allowed to happen, and it wasn't made clear to the Auditor General. She wasn't told about this and wasn't told that Minister Clement himself had the paper trail. I would say that represents an ethical breach. That's much beyond the issue of public accounts.
I don't think we need to debate all day about this. I'm glad my honourable colleague knows where Windsor is, but he would know that Muskoka isn't anywhere near the border, and yet Muskoka got $50 million of border money funnelled into the riding and Parliament was misled. If the Conservative government thought that Tony Clement needed $50 million to get re-elected, that should have been a line item. That's how a legitimate government would act. They'd say that Tony needed $50 million and show their line item, and we would see that in the budget. We didn't see Tony Clement's $50 million line item; we saw border infrastructure. The day the United States goes all the way up to Barrie, then maybe that investment of gazebos would help fortify our army. But right now Muskoka is a couple of hundred kilometres from the border. Parliament was told this is for the border; they were not told it was for Tony Clement. Again I think that's an abuse of Parliament.
This is an issue for our committee. The ethics committee must deal with this and must deal with the breach of this minister and whether or not senior bureaucrats participated in a cover-up to keep the Auditor General from doing her work.