Mr. Speaker, in reply to the Minister of Finance's budget, I wish to underline that the government totally ignored the recommendations found in the Auditor General's report.
Canada is going through a major crisis. The accumulated debt exceeds $500 billion, and the annual deficit now totals $41 billion. In other words, each year, this unmanageable country earns less than it spends, and is inevitably heading toward economic bankruptcy.
Big corporations and capital holders say that a decrease in their profits resulting from a fairer tax system would cause irreparable damage to the economy.
So, they argue that the government must slash budgetary expenses. The business community, the decision-makers in the world of high finance suggest that the time is right to dismantle
what is left of the welfare state. The neo-conservatism of the 1980s is now the philosophy of the Minister of Finance in the present Liberal government, since he fully approves of the big corporations' approach, and his budget proves it.
In fact, this budget speech announces that the government will, during the next three years, cut more than $7.5 billion from social programs, particularly unemployment insurance. Thus, the government has avoided launching a frontal attack on major great financial interests, while it has ignored waste within its bureaucracy and mismanagement by senior civil servants and its own policy-makers.
First of all, I would like to remind the House of some of the comments the Auditor General made in his last report about waste and mismanagement of public funds, which comments the Minister of Finance totally ignored while preparing his budget.
The government is doing absolutely nothing to reduce the structural deficit, since it avoids dealing with waste and mismanagement. Let me give you some examples of waste. The federal vehicle fleet costs more than $500 million and 4,000 new vehicles are added every year; Investment Canada has spent $132,000 to set up a new office, complete with a kitchen and a bathroom, for the new president, even if the office of the previous president, located in the same building, provided all those amenities. The cost of the use of the Challenger aircrafts reached $54 million, more than half of which was spent for transporting ministers. According to the Auditor General, this comes to $19,650 per hour of flight. More than 800 civil servants who received a cash out to retire were rehired afterwards. About $30 million was wasted that way.
The Canadian Grain Commission has made an ex gratia payment-and I remind you that an ex gratia payment is one that is made as a gift, in the public interest, and not because it is legally necessary-in the amount of approximately $657,000 to some producers as compensation for losses incurred because a seed cleaning company that had obtained a licence from the Commission went bankrupt.
What measures in this budget tend to eliminate such waste, which is only the tip of the iceberg? None. And what about the mismanagement that has become generalized within the Public Service since the Liberal Party was in power at the end of the 1960s and beginning of the 1970s? The Auditor General has given several examples of this, which we have grouped according to three types of problems: program assessment, identification of program overlapping, and a more general view of certain expenditures reflecting poor management on the part of the government.
On the subject of program assessment, in his 1993 report, the Auditor General especially blamed mismanagement of public funds on a glaring lack of close examination of government spending. He recommended that programs be judged on their results so as to guide policy decisions. The Bloc Quebecois has already raised this point, but it is worth repeating that nowhere in this Liberal budget is the problem of program assessment really addressed.
From a quantitative standpoint, between 1989 and 1992, program evaluation spending fell by 28 per cent, resulting in a much smaller number of program evaluations being performed. In 1987-88, 99 program evaluations were conducted, compared to only 80 in 1992. Again according to the Auditor General's report, in 1991-92, the government spent $125 billion on 16 programs, only two of which were thoroughly evaluated. It is not the most expensive programs which are evaluated. It is estimated that twice as many programs worth less than $250 million are evaluated compared to those worth more than $250 million.
From a qualitative standpoint, since the responsibility for program evaluation rests with the department, the immediate needs of managers prevail over the government's needs and the public interest. When interviewed by the Auditor General, the persons responsible for program evaluation within the department said that the most important role of an evaluation is to assist managers in solving organizational problems. So they pay no attention to the fundamental function of program evaluation, which is to measure the effectiveness of a program and to question its relevancy if necessary in order to achieve optimal resource allocation. It is to be noted that this type of information would be most useful to Parliament in allocating resources and to Canadians in rating government performance. In fact, parliamentarians are asked to work blindly, to allocate resources without knowing the facts.
In his report, the Auditor General says, and I quote: "In the 1990s, program evaluation should be seen as crucial to the management of government expenditures, because it can help to arrive at informed decisions aimed at controlling growth of the public debt". In spite of that warning or, if you prefer, of that suggestion by the Auditor General, nothing in the budget would lead one to believe that the Liberal government is heading in that direction.
Overlapping remains one of the main causes of waste and poor financial management. The federal spending power in areas of provincial jurisdiction accounts for 24 per cent of overlapping and the power to legislate in areas of shared jurisdiction accounts for 76 per cent of overlapping, but, again, nothing in the budget shows that there is a will to change the traditional Liberal way of thinking in this regard.
Program duplication is partly to blame for the mismanagement of public funds and is therefore responsible for the increasing cost of government action. Since it is more economi-
cal to give to only one administration exclusive jurisdiction over services provided simultaneously; since duplication often adds nothing to the quality of government interventions, quite the contrary; since affected employees and facilities could be used in a much more rational and relevant way; and since also the measures put in place by both levels of government often cancel each other out, the competing if not conflicting nature of federal-provincial relations makes it difficult to co-ordinate programs because neither level of government is ready to make major concessions about their own objectives and priorities.
Finally, program duplication is an inflationary factor in the Canadian economy since an increase in the amount of information citizens must have to be able to take advantage of the services and financial aid available, or to conform to laws and regulations, results in a multiplication of the steps required to get that information and thus, in an increase in the number of employees involved in a somewhat unproductive task.
In conclusion, we find it hard to understand that the Minister of Finance, who seems to have made the fight against deficit his priority, has ignored the recommendations of the Auditor General about waste and mismanagement of public funds. In order to eliminate waste, unnecessary spending and mismanagement in government, in the name of the Bloc Quebecois, I request again that the government create a parliamentary committee to analyze and review budget spending, item by item.