Thank you, Chair.
When I spoke to the AG, had I received any signal, either directly from the words or.... I'm a politician; I wordsmith. If I had been getting words that were telling me something, or even just a straight-up “We're really under the gun here, and this is really bad”.... If I had been given that in any way, shape or form.... Go ask Mr. Albas what I did and threatened to do as the chair of the committee on a couple of occasions. I can't go into it too much, because we're in public, but suffice it to say that I took any attack on the work of the Auditor General very seriously and was prepared to do anything legal to counteract it, to fight it.
But there was no need. Where was the fight? Had I done that, I would have been violating the golden rule of public accounts: I would have become partisan. I would have tried to take a scenario, as the government is doing right now, and as that minister, Joyce Murray, is doing in the House right now, and playing right into that kind of politics. Had I said, “This is a cut; you're going after the Auditor General” and tried to make a great big deal of it, I would have been violating that sacred rule that we have to have to make this committee work, and the rule is that when we walk through that door, we leave our party membership at the door and we are in here as parliamentarians, providing oversight and accountability regardless of the colour of the government in power. To me, that's what I would have been doing.
Colleagues, you know me. I was busting for that fight. I was not happy. However, the Auditor General said, publicly and privately, that they could manage and—most importantly for me, meaning me as the parliamentarian—that all the work that they would normally provide to Parliament would continue. He said they could do it, and they did. If you look at the number of audits through those years, and the cuts, you'll see that they managed to live up to their word.
Now, to my mind, I made the right decision. I accepted it, as did the rest of the committee, and we moved on. That was that. We've had no problems since then—until this year, until about two weeks ago. All of a sudden, out of nowhere, the government is denying the Auditor General a requested $10.8 million so that their office can do the work for Parliament.
I'm going to keep coming back to that, especially when there are more people paying attention, because unless that minister gives me a personal apology, I intend to—