Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I'm not exactly sure where my colleague Mr. Laforest would like to go with this, but this whole issue came to light because the public accounts committee asked the Auditor General a couple of years back, or whenever, to conduct an investigation into this, and we now have this report tabled before us.
The reason the public accounts committee is dealing with this issue is primarily to find out why there happened to be a $50 million discrepancy between Envoy and Royal LePage—one bid zero, and another bid basically $50 million. Our job is to investigate the government; it's not to look into the private sector.
If I could quote the Auditor General, there was no suggestion of impropriety here, Mr. Chairman. I think the same concept was given to us by Mr. Marshall, the Deputy Minister of Public Works and Government Services, that while mistakes were made in the contract, there was certainly nothing inappropriate in the way it was handled, just the fact that through some, shall we say, lack of competence on some people's part, it didn't work out as well as perhaps it should have. And I think about Professor Franks, who was here last week, talking about the need for the public accounts committee to focus on accountability, not partisan politics.
We all know that Sandra Buckler now has responsibilities within the government, and if we brought her in, I'm not even sure what we would ask her to explain, because there was nothing in the Auditor General's report suggesting that Royal LePage did anything illegal, other than perhaps maybe double charging, but that's a different issue. There was no indication that Envoy did anything inappropriate. Nobody is suggesting that the government did anything inappropriate—incompetent, yes, but not inappropriate. It was basically a normal business transaction that wasn't properly put out to bid, and we are dealing with the fallout from that.
I don't know where we're going to go in bringing in Sandra Buckler, Mr. Chairman. Are we going to try to find out how Royal LePage does their business? Is it our business to find that out? Is it up to them to tell us because we just want to gain some political brownie points to bring in lobbyists and others to try to explain what they were doing? I think it's actually quite inappropriate, Mr. Chairman, and if the member wants to go down this track, it seems to me he's actually opening up a whole new investigation. If we did want to go down that way, it would have to go back to the steering committee and come forward as a report.
What exactly are we're trying to achieve here? I've always looked at the Auditor General's reports, and her report has been quite clear and categorical. We have a problem, we're dealing with it, and therefore I see no reason why we would support this motion.