Thank you so much, Mr. Chair.
Auditor General Hogan, congratulations. I'm really excited to meet you and to be here.
Prior to getting into my questions for you specifically, I'd just like to offer some context.
I'm so glad Mr. Poilievre went down memory lane because I was reading this morning the opening statement from the interim auditor general, Sylvain Ricard, when he appeared before the public accounts committee. It outlined for me why Conservative cuts continue to hurt our democracy and accountability in this country.
In those statements it talked about what Mr. Poilievre brought up about the reduced number of audits that are happening currently. Even though we increased the budget in vote 1, a lot of that money went to fund the underfunded staffing and technology that was needed, which was cut from 2014-15, including payroll and Phoenix, another Conservative scandal that has set us back many years. I think I read in his comments that something like one-third of new funding would still be going to paying back, essentially, the staff who had to be cut in 2014-15. You didn't cut the staff, but you couldn't afford to pay them based on the Conservative cuts.
I bring this context up not to put you, Auditor General, in a political position to comment on that, but these seem to be the facts that were spoken of to public accounts. The fact is that a lot of the existing—and this isn't even COVID-related—expenses are actually due to those previous significant cuts, years of inability to get the expertise as well as the technology needed for these more complex audits, so they couldn't be done and we fell behind. Now a lot of the funding increases or bringing those levels back up really just goes back to playing catch-up, because the Conservatives decided that accountability wasn't important during their mandate.
What brings us to today and my question for you, Auditor General, is moving forward, because I fundamentally believe in an independent, accountable Auditor General for all governments—moving forward, dealing with the fact that we're playing catch-up based on Conservative cuts that are still hurting us today, and moving forward on a situation like COVID, which has had significant, obviously unprecedented, unforeseen changes in every department.
I know that one of the recommendations for moving forward on funding was an automatic annual adjustment based on expenses. If that were the process, notwithstanding the increase needed to catch up, which I understand you're making and will be clear, but moving forward, if an automatic annual adjustment were made and a situation like COVID came up, wouldn't that just blow the budget in terms of expenses and put us in this exact same position of how you both continue the regular operating work of the Auditor General's office and take into account the unforeseen, unprecedented studies and the function of your office?
What is the best mechanism, which COVID is now teaching us, to be flexible and to keep doing the regular work in addition to some of these unforeseen things, so that your office can then provide services to Canadians?