Madam Speaker, I am happy to see that the main objective of the opposition member is for the federal government to manage taxpayers' money with justice and honesty. I agree with him entirely. That is why, in the case of the Oka claim, even though we had already paid $122 million to Quebec under the Disaster Financial Assistance Arrangements, when we decided that we did not have to pay anything else, instead of just saying: "No more, we owe you nothing more", we went to the extreme courtesy of naming a third party to audit the books once again in order to give the province of Quebec another chance.
It is also the reason why we asked the auditor general, who is certainly the most credible reference in the matter of fairness and good management of public funds, to go once again over all the invoices, to try to determine if we still owed something to Quebec. If the report says we still owe certain amounts to Quebec, if we owe money, we will pay up.
As far as fiscal stabilization is concerned, I mentioned earlier that we have reviewed all the payment criteria and have come to the conclusion that no amounts were owing. Quebec is not the only province in this case. The situation is the same for Saskatchewan. This province also presented claims which, in our judgment, were not in accordance with the established payment criteria, so the amounts requested were not paid to Saskatchewan either.
In the present case, the opposition will, once again, have to congratulate us because we chose not to pay amounts that were not owed. But, to be perfectly fair, we came to the conclusion that we had to allow Quebec, as well as all the other provinces, to appeal our decision and our interpretation of the criteria. Clearly, the provincial government should not appeal to us, since we concluded that there was no money owed as far as stabilization was concerned, but to a court of law since it is the interpretation of the law which is being challenged.
In the third case, our friend from the opposition suggests that we at least give an amount corresponding to expenditures as a whole and hammer out the adjustments later on. But what have we done so far? In fact, in all these years, we have given $464 million to the province of Quebec for the education of aboriginal people. However, as the province of Quebec did not fulfill its responsibilities according to the James Bay agreement, we were not able to verify if there were other amounts that could be owed. Once again, to be as fair as we could, we proposed that a group of civil servants study the amounts given, the school board budgets, their capital budgets, the make-up of the student population, to see if other amounts were owed.
I say again, if we come to the conclusion that we owe some money, we will pay up. I conclude by saying that not only did we pay our fair share, but also we went the extra mile to give the province of Quebec every recourse possible and to ensure its claims are reviewed.
In this case, if opposition members are fair-minded about this, if they try to see just how well the federal government has managed the taxpayers' money and to understand the fairness principles involved, I am pretty sure that they will vote against their own motion.