Mr. Speaker, I would like, first of all, to congratulate my colleague, the hon. member for St. Albert, for the motion he put forward to the House. It will certainly generate a good debate. It is quite appropriate to review government spending as a whole. Everyone will agree with that. Year after year, the Auditor General tables reports that raise disturbing matters about public spending.
This motion is pretty much in line with what we discussed yesterday during debate on the motion of the Official Opposition. Several of my colleagues in the Official Opposition asked for a House committee to be established in order to review all government spending, item by item. We were told, in particular by our colleagues on the government side, that such a committee already existed, the Public Accounts Committee, and was responsible for such reviews of government spending. I believe the comment by the hon. member for Ottawa-Vanier shows the need for a committee mandated by the House of Commons. I hope this would make the House more responsive to its recommendations and more likely to follow up on them.
I will conclude this comment by referring to the speech of the hon. member for St. Albert-I had to go out for a few seconds and I may have missed a short part-because I did not hear him talk about the duplications mentioned in the motion. This aspect, and I will conclude on that, Mr. Speaker, is a great concern for Quebec in particular, but also for the whole of Canada, because the costs are estimated to be in the billions of dollars. I would like to have the opinion of the hon. member for St. Albert, as well as other Reform members, on this issue of duplication of services.