Hopefully, everything will go as....
I just wanted to mention to Mr. Arseneault that “deal” is not a bad word. I mean, “backroom deal” sounds bad, but when my friend Alexandra came in and said—we were still in camera, so I hope I'm okay saying this—that we had “white smoke”, it meant that we had come to a meeting of the minds. It meant that we had a deal, just like they do it at the Sistine Chapel when they have a deal. So the word itself is not necessarily negative; it depends on what kind of deal you're cutting.
The letter is done now. That piece is good. I appreciate that. I thank my colleagues for the good-faith bargaining. Hopefully, we'll go on the optimistic note that Thursday will happen. There are two last things for me. One is to say my final bit. There are a couple of things I want to put on the record. You've acknowledged that I'll have the time to do that. I will not take long. You have my word.
The very last thing would be to formally withdraw my motion, in which case, then, we're moving on. Hopefully, this gets picked up and the fight continues in the House, where it needs to be.
The main reason, Chair, that I wanted to have a couple of minutes for closing remarks is that it's incredibly frustrating to consistently see the President of the Treasury Board, every time...and I don't think there's been an exception. Every time she's been asked a question about this $10.8 million, we get a side discussion about what happened in 2011. That was eight years ago. The essence of the message from the President of the Treasury Board to the Conservatives—and to the NDP, suggesting that we sort of went along with this and didn't care—about why the government is denying the AG's office the $10.8 million it needs to do all of its chapters, including cybersecurity, is that what they did was so awful, they need to put it in comparison. To me, that's an argument that says, at best, that, yes, what we're doing is awful, but it's not as awful as what they did.
It's very frustrating, because that's all the minister has to say. The minister has not given one substantive reason why there isn't the $10.8 million that the Auditor General office needs to finish off the chapters they want to do, including on cybersecurity. They've given not one solid answer. We as Parliament deserve better than that, especially since the Auditor General is our employee. It's our staff person. It's Parliament's staff person, not the executive council's. They're not part of the broader public service. They work for, are accountable to, and are hired and fired by Parliament. If the executive council, the cabinet, is going to deny that funding, then at the very, very least they should give a reason why. Just saying that the other guys did it too doesn't cut it, especially for a government that went out of their way to say four years ago, when they wanted power and got it, that, oh, we're going to be different; we're going to treat committees different; we're going to respect Parliament; we're going to be the most amazing thing you've ever seen; and we've had our last first-past-the-post election. There were all these great enunciations.
I'm not running again, so I don't need to do much more of that. I have competent colleagues and a successor—I see Kent is applauding that I'm not going there—but it doesn't change the fact that it is really frustrating for a parliamentarian who has no interest in partisan politics right now. I have zero interest in that. It does nothing for me. I don't need a headline. As I already mentioned, I wanted this to be nice and quiet. This is the opposite of what I was looking for, but it does need to be underscored. As someone who has been around here for a while and who has some strong feelings about these matters, I do know a little bit about it. It is just unacceptable what is happening here—that the executive council, the very group that has to answer for the Auditor General's reports, is saying that his office can't have the money.
I had a delegation come in. I won't say what country it was from. It was maybe before your time, Chair. It might even have been when I was chair but about six or eight years ago. What was interesting is that they had the legislation independent of the Auditor General. They had the independent legislation, just what you would hope for, as good as Britain's and as good as ours. It was good.
The committee was structured—
