Mr. Speaker, the hon. member for Durham, a Liberal member, has put forward Bill C-214, a bill to provide for improved information on the cost of proposed government programs.
The hon. member for Durham, who sat on the Standing Committee on Public Accounts as vice-chairman, is very interested in any administrative or legislative measure that would make the government more responsible or accountable for the enormous amounts taxpayers invest every year in the federal public service.
I want to assure the hon. member of my support in requiring the estimated annual cost and cost per capita of every new program be published as soon as the bill that authorizes it is introduced in Parliament or the regulation that implements it is issued.
The bill also requires that the auditor general be called upon to determine whether the method of calculation is valid and the cost is a good estimate. This assessment and the method to calculate the estimated cost used by the auditor general would go a long way to reassure the public on the objectivity of the calculations and cost estimate.
To increase public awareness of the actual cost of government programs and enhance transparency, as promised by the Prime Minister during the last election campaign, transparency that never really materialized, this bill also requires the total cost and cost per capital of each program to be displayed at any place where the program is delivered to the public.
The purpose of Bill C-214 is to require all departments to provide detailed financial or cost analyses for any new legislative measure.
Estimating these costs on a per capita basis will help individual citizens understand more clearly how much each new piece of legislation costs them personally, how much is actually taken out of their pockets each time the government put a new program in place.
This bill will make legislators and public service officials more aware of the financial impact of various legislative measures. It will also encourage the public to pay closer attention to government spending.
I agree with the hon. member for Durham, when he says that, had such a legislation been in place in the past, the debt burden facing the taxpayers would have been much lower today.
I sympathize with the hon. member for Durham. His background and personal experience, as well as his work at the public accounts committee level, have all contributed to leading him to put Bill C-214 before this House. However, while he has our support, the problem for the hon. member, who sincerely wants to prevent the setting up of programs that are useless and too costly, is that his own government, his own party turns a deaf ear to his bill.
Indeed, the cost of government programs is the least of the Liberal's worries. Since the days of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, the Liberal Party of Canada has buried Canadians under a mountain of debts, and the current Prime Minister is carrying on the tradition. The notion of cost-benefit analysis is a foreign to this government as its understanding of Quebec is flawed or, for that matter, the existence of two distinct peoples in Canada and the partnership that could exist between them. This Liberal government's constitutional policy is based on confrontation. The Liberals prefer covering up to transparency and to analyzing the real costs of government programs.
For these reasons, Bill C-214 stands little chance of being supported by the hon. member's own party, even though such legislation is urgently required.
A good illustration of the Liberals lack of support for Bill C-214 is an E-mail note we received in which the Liberal member for Bruce-Grey writes the following to his colleague for Durham, and I quote:
"While I find the objective of the bill laudable, I am concerned that it could prove to be costly and cumbersome, particularly if applied to all new programming proposals regardless of materiality".
While cost estimating is the very basis of the evaluation of any new product or service in the private sector, the Liberal member for Bruce-Grey tells us that estimating the cost of any new program would be too costly when we do not know whether the program will actually be implemented. The member for Bruce-Grey seems to be implying that it is better to implement a new program without knowing its costs, then to know the costs of a new program whose financial impact would lead us not to implement it.
Such is the Liberal philosophy: it is better to not know the costs of a new program, because this information could arouse the suspicions of the media, of the opposition parties and of the taxpayers, who would strongly object to its implementation.
Better to keep the public in the dark about the real costs of programs, and above all to keep the auditor general, with his objective and transparent opinion about such information, at a distance.
We saw this, during hearings of the finance committee on the transfer of two billion dollars of Canadian capital tax free to the United States. Members of the Liberal majority and the chairman of the committee himself tried to put the auditor general on the
spot, because he had dared to give a dissenting opinion on the controversial decision by the revenue department and the finance minister regarding this unusual transfer of funds to the United States.
The final report by the Standing Committee on Finance, with which the Bloc Quebecois was not in agreement-we tabled a dissenting report-is devoted largely to trying to refute and undermine the auditor general's opinion.
As political debate and public morality, we have seen worse. Instead of attacking the message, Liberals attack the messenger.
At the end of his note to the member for Durham, the Liberal member for Bruce-Grey says, and I quote:
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"With respect to the role of the auditor general, his mandate is one of ex-post review. Indeed your proposal may create a conflict of interest for his office".
The Liberals want to continue to maintain the role of the auditor general's office as one of intervening after the fact, when the deed is done and taxpayers money has already been committed and spent.
As for the possibility of conflict of interest in the auditor general's role, the Liberals have put themselves in a conflict of interest situation for some time by attacking the auditor general during hearings of the finance committee and in their subsequent committee report to the House. The auditor general is accountable only to Parliament, and that is why the Liberals are so afraid of him, do not want to extend his mandate and are trying to undermine his credibility to diminish the impact of his views. This is petty politicking.
Bill C-214 presented by the hon. member for Durham, will unfortunately not be supported by his own party, because it calls for innovation in administration, for transparency-