The connections are amazing.
For the interpreters, the last paragraph is on page 4:
As ministerial staff often act on behalf of their minister and serve as a buffer between the department and the minister, they wield considerable influence, if not de facto authority. While they are not to direct public servants, there is a lack of clarity about what constitutes appropriate interactions with public servants. These examples demonstrate how this lack of clarity has led to disputes over the proper role of ministerial staff and what it means for a minister to be responsible and accountable for the actions when controversy arises. Apart from the brief advice provided in the Privy Council Office's Accountable Government guide noted above, the role of ministerial staff remains relatively undefined.
The next section here is on the standards of ethical conduct, but maybe I'll come back to that in a moment to try to answer MP Blaikie's question. I don't want him to forget that he asked it, and I want people to understand the context of that.
People who are watching may have seen these graphics on social media that show that the current government has added more to the public debt than all other governments combined. That's why we'd like the minister responsible for the finance department to show up per our request and be here. She needs to be accountable for the fact that she has played a major role, she and her predecessor Bill Morneau, or, as the Prime Minister calls him, a "random Liberal". In certain respects, it may be something that's whispered at the Liberal Party convention this weekend, "Bill no more", as someone affectionately called him. The two finance ministers combined, along with their boss—the one thing that links both of them—have added more to the public debt than all other prime ministers.
To MP Blaikie's comments, how does that fare? We have a national debt at the end of this five-year fiscal framework of somewhere between $1.3 trillion or $1.4 trillion. As I said, if, during the rest of this mandate, this government doesn't spend a dollar more on new programs....
I should add, and I know I tend to digress sometimes, but these ideas come into my head. The minister of industry—I am the shadow minister for industry—as we know, recently made a commitment of $14 billion to Volkswagen. The amount of $778 million used to be an astronomical sum when we talked about it, but they will spend $778 million of taxpayers' money assisting Volkswagen in building this EV battery plant. Then we'll spend $13 billion in subsidizing Volkswagen's operations.
Now, I have to tell you that I've looked a lot through these budget documents, and I know the $778 million is included in the SIF program, as it's called. I sometimes refer to it as the “sieve program”, but the SIF program is a program where this government chooses to subsidize large, multinational companies from other countries. In fact, Volkswagen's revenue last year was the same as the Government of Canada's revenue, $413 billion, so they are in desperate need of Canadian taxpayer money, clearly. That $413 billion that we spend.... I've looked through this, and I've looked through the fall economic statement last year, which promised a balanced budget. All of these documents that are tabled with all these glossy pictures don't have any reference to $13 billion of government spending. I think I've figured out why.
They figured out why, and I'm being asked why. Apparently the estimate.... We'll see the contracts on Monday through a parliamentary order. We had to put a parliamentary order through the industry committee in order to see the contracts, but with the parliamentary order, we'll get a look at the contracts.
According to the Volkswagen deal, apparently it will take five or six years to build this plant. This government, with its tendency to spend money it doesn't have, has created a new way of doing that, because the $13 billion doesn't kick in until the year after this fiscal framework. This amount is then spread over 10 years, from 2027 onwards, I think, or 2028 onwards, to 10 years after. That is when they've assigned taxpayers to spend the money, far outside this fiscal framework.
I think the minister needs to come here and explain to us why she allowed her colleague to make a commitment that ranges to 15 years out from now, far outside the fiscal framework, and the minister of industry—
