Oh, there is a public accounts meeting later today, so it's being requested that we actually hear just a little more, for the usage of those who have dual committee responsibilities, what the Treasury Board says the roles of ministers are with respect to the public accounts committee.
It has in the final paragraph on page 16, “The Standing Committee on Public Accounts”—otherwise more colloquially known as the public accounts committee—“scrutinizes all reports of the auditor general and The Public Accounts of Canada once they are tabled in the House of Commons.”
If viewers want to see what the agenda is for those committees or for this committee, they can go to Ourcommons.ca and click under “Committees”, pick out the committee they're interested in and see the agenda. If, for some reason, this committee's not being broadcast on CPAC, those who are watching this will know already, I guess, that they can go to ParlVU. They can watch anything that's going on online in Parliament. They just click on the committee. They can actually go back and view past things. They could go back and start to watch from the beginning, if they wanted to, my presentation on ministerial accountability and these important government documents.
It's being pointed out that these are in both official languages, because I do respect immensely my Bloc colleagues and want to make sure people know that they can get any of these presentations or minutes and can watch or view in both official languages. It's easy. There's a button to click at the bottom. You just choose between English and French. That's very important, because we are an officially bilingual country.
We only have one officially bilingual province, though: New Brunswick. Canadians have a right to ask for government services in the language of their choice.
This final paragraph continues about the public accounts committee, “The Committee helps ensure that public funds are spent for the purposes authorized by Parliament.” It doesn't say that the committee helps understand or oversee the monies spent by the Minister of Finance on her own, without anybody watching over her shoulder, except for, maybe, the chief of staff of the Prime Minister. It doesn't say that here in this Treasury Board document.
What it has is, “The Committee helps ensure that public funds are spent for the purposes authorized by Parliament.” Only Parliament can authorize spending, right? This is part of this process, this massive omnibus bill amending 51 acts. It's important, to get to an understanding of that act that we be able to ask the key questions, and we need to ask them to the minister responsible. It's a fairly basic thing.
It actually goes back to the basic establishment of the mother of all parliaments in Great Britain. For those of you who don't know, the reason the House of Commons is green is that the first House of Commons in Britain was held in a farmer's field. It wasn't held in the winter, so the grass was green. That's why that's our colour—to represent the commoners, the farmers, agriculture, the roots of our country, the common people, because the common people have common sense. That's what we should be following to bring it home.
The Treasury Board report continues to say that the public accounts committee does not assess the appropriateness of policies adopted by the government. It's actually for committees like this to examine the appropriateness of those issues. Public accounts' job is to ensure that the money that was allocated to change the symbol on the king's crown from a religious symbol to a snowflake—because apparently Canada is the only country with snow—has been spent correctly, and that it hasn't been spent on enforcement of rules regarding elvers—although, Lord knows, we need that since the RCMP is refusing to enforce the law in Nova Scotia around illegal poaching. Maybe some of that money could be diverted there—but, no, the public accounts would find that a misuse of public funds, because that is not what Parliament will be approving. If Parliament approves this bill, it will approve those specific changes.
It's funny though. Even though this bill deals with symbols around royalty, I was shocked to learn that the bill doesn't deal with the imagines on Canada's passport. The government decided on its own that we should remove the image of Terry Fox and replace it with a squirrel eating a nut. Apparently a squirrel eating a nut is more Canadian than Terry Fox.
That would be an interesting question to pose to the minister. Maybe the minister is thinking that she has to squirrel it away for a rainy day. I don't see any squirrelling away for a rainy day in this budget with $130 billion of debt projected to be added to our national debt, bringing it to almost $1.4 trillion, by the way, of which $1.1 trillion will have been added by the two Trudeaus. For those who don't know it, the current Prime Minister's father was also prime minister for a number of years and left our country in—oh, I've been asked which years, because we have some young people in the room.
Specifically, he was first elected in 1968 and then defeated—which was a glorious day—on February 23, 1979, if I am correct, but I will defer to my Beatles expert, who may know more specifically.
Unfortunately, nine months later, that government of the Right Honourable Joe Clark.... By the way, for those who don't know it, after Pierre Trudeau was defeated, he resigned as leader. He drove away from Parliament Hill in his rare Mercedes Gullwing car because he didn't have the limo anymore. That car, which the son now owns, is worth something around $30 million or $40 million. The car is actually worth more than the $14 million that apparently the Prime Minister is worth. The car is actually worth more than his other assets. That doesn't seem right, but he inherited a beautiful car, and Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau left town with his tail between his legs in a very expensive, collectible and rare car.
In early 1980 a very colourful finance minister, who later in the Mulroney government went on to serve as justice minister and trade minister, someone by the name of John Crosbie, who was Joe Clark's finance minister in 1979, presented a budget, accountable to Parliament. That budget proposed the outrageous idea that in order the help pay off the debt and deficits that Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau had built up—which was the reason he lost his finance minister, by the way, in 1975 when John Turner resigned over that—there would be a tax on gasoline of 18¢ a gallon. We hadn't converted to metric yet, but that would be 4.5¢ a litre. For those who don't know what a Canadian gallon is, it's not a U.S. gallon. They would have been pikers compared to this government and the carbon tax, which, before the end of the decade, is going to add 41¢ a litre to the cost of gas. Unfortunately we lost John Crosbie a couple of years ago, but John would blush at the thought of presenting a budget that imposed 41¢ per litre of tax because the result of John Crosbie's tax of 18¢ a gallon or 4.5¢ a litre was that the Liberals and the NDP got together, I believe with the Union Nationale from Quebec, to defeat the Crosbie budget and send us to an election.
You would think that, at the time since the Liberals didn't have a leader, they wouldn't have done such a thing and would have respected the fact that somebody was trying to clean up the mess they had caused, but apparently not, so the wily old Allan MacEachen from Nova Scotia got Pierre Trudeau back into the saddle to fight the 1980 election, where he ran around calling himself “The Gunslinger”. Can you imagine that? A Liberal Prime Minister called himself the gunslinger. Given what the Liberals are doing with Bill C-21, I find it hard to believe that they would be proud of the legacy of a Liberal prime minister who served ultimately from 1968 to 1979 and then from 1980 to 1984 called himself the gunslinger.
He would actually stand with his fingers pointed like guns in his belt loop when he was campaigning. The gunslinger. I guess he had a different view on firearms from the one the current government has.
If I could go on to the next sentence of the report, it's the last sentence on page 16—