My colleague says “in principle”, but it is still the case.
When I look at something like this, where never mind a detail of information or a letter or a report that we need to do our job properly on an audit report, rather than that being what's in front of us, the issue is whether the bloody audit's going to be done, this is insane and I don't get the politics of it. That's why I say to the government members—through you, Chair, with respect—that I don't understand the politics of this.
Why on earth, on the doorstep of a federal election, would the Government of Canada pull funding or deny funding for one of the most motherhood departments in all of government?
The department and the person that I call the best friend Canadians have on Parliament Hill is the Auditor General, and in the ramp-up to an election, for the first time in Canadian history, the sitting government decides it's going to cut. That's assuming it's not cut but an increase denied, which has the effect of a cut.
Maybe Gerry Butts' leaving has left you with absolutely nobody with any strategic sense at all. I have to tell you that I was hoping that, once the you-know-what hit the fan, the message would go up through the system and there would be a minister somewhere who said, “Wait a minute, what?” I was a minister and you were a minister, Chair. You can't follow every single moving part, especially if you have a big ministry. You have to rely on your staff and you're approving things at a certain level. Trust me, $10.8 million, the finance minister of this G7 country almost spills that much in a week.
It's not about the money. It can't be, with $10.8 million. I think that's the number. That's chump change in terms of the federal budget, but in terms of the importance to Parliament, it's a thousand times greater.
If the politics make no sense—and they don't—there has to be another reason, and that's why I'm looking at this and I'm saying, there are only two that really come to my mind. It's revenge. It's Treasury Board officials—or if I'm wronging them, it's whomever the people are who sit down at the staff level and talk about budgets with our agents of Parliament. I remind colleagues that the OAG are not the executive's employees, not cabinet employees, but Parliament's employees, and this nonsense that we have a funding mechanism that says they have to go back to the very people they audit makes no sense.
The government—and I'll get to this a little later—made a commitment that it was going to provide an alternate mechanism. It hasn't happened. In fact, I didn't even know about this letter, but there was a letter in January of this year that went to the Clerk of the Privy Council, signed by all Parliament's—not the government's—officers, every one of them, basically saying, “You promised you were going to do this. It hasn't happened. We need it to happen quick.” That was January. Crickets!
So retaliation is.... I mean it's hard to believe in this country that something like that would happen, for those of us who know how this system works, but I'm desperately trying to find reasons that would explain to me why the government is doing this, because if we could figure out why they're doing it, then we can work at focusing on that and getting it unravelled. But for the life of me.... So that's one possibility.
The other.... I suppose there are three because there's also the unknown. Both of those could be wrong and there could be some other thing motivating it that I don't know. Fair enough, but when I look at that combatting cybersecurity and I think how important that is.... Think ahead. What if there was a report in a year or two that said we're more vulnerable than we were 10 years ago?