I thank Mr. Kelly and that's what I wanted to clarify. I was listening, but I didn't see anything there that got us off the dime. I was very straightforward with Mr. Whalen. I think I'm being open and honest. I never considered myself clever enough to pull off the alternative.
If you ask what gets us out of this, all I need to shut me up—as one member, for what it's worth—is for the government to announce that the $10.8 million for the Auditor General will be there. I don't need mechanisms. I don't need time frames, but I need to hear that the $10.8 million....
Again, Mr. Whalen, your suggestion takes me full circle back to the politics of this. How did we get into this? If I were sitting over where you were, I'd be camped out in that minister's office wanting to know why I have this problem. Why is public accounts, two weeks before we rise, into a filibuster? Why was this necessary? What was the purpose?
I understand—I won't get into the detail—that it may have something to do with the agents of Parliament and how if one gets funded and it throws things.... I understand that. I've been in government. I understand that problem, but I have two responses.
Number one, the House leader already had a mandate to fix this and didn't do it. There was a letter from the agents of Parliament in January of this year asking the Liberals to fix that funding mechanism. Had that funding mechanism been fixed and in place, I suspect that this whole process would have gone down a different road and this wouldn't have happened.
However, that's not where we are yet. There are two pieces in front of us. One is that for the first time...and I have more stuff to read in here that underscores that this has never happened before. It's this underfunding of the Auditor General that, again, I'll keep coming back to because there's an answer. I just can't find it.