Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I think this should be a relatively uncontroversial motion that should achieve unanimous support from committee members today.
As all of you know, the Auditor General has indicated a shortage of funding. This is due to the exceptional volume of government spending in need of auditing and some specific tasks that Parliament has given the office. One is to audit the missing funds in the infrastructure program. The other is to audit the $152 billion of new spending in the last two and a half months in response to COVID-19.
There are also, of course, typically audits that the office is doing of its own accord without any parliamentary direction at all. The office has indicated, though, that this workload cannot happen with the current funding levels.
I'll put it into context here for clarity. This year government spending will be twice what it was a decade ago. It's hard to believe the government has doubled its expenses in just one decade, yet the Auditor General's budget has barely grown at the rate of inflation. The Liberal members—