Mr. Speaker, in its report, the Liberal majority did question the mandate of the auditor general, claiming that he had overstepped his mandate.
In fact, he was well within the scope of his mandate. In the recent past, between 1982 and 1994, there have been no less than seven or eight cases of interpretation regarding taxation, taxation law, the
Canadian Income Tax Act by the auditor general. That is his job too. He does not only look at expenditures and waste. He also looks at how public funds are administered, how the money taxpayers in Quebec and Canada entrust with the federal government is administered. That is his job. He is directly mandated to do that.
This is rather surprising, because, while the auditor general's reputation was being tarnished, in a carefully crafted passage covering about ten pages, with the Liberals using the six experts who testified before the finance committee last summer as their authority-the six experts working for wealthy Canadian families and helping them find ways to dodge tax-these six experts could have been confronted to at least 15 academic tax experts, researchers, real experts with no connection with wealthy Canadian families or interests in firms like Stikeman Elliott, for example, that may in the past have helped put away hundreds of millions of dollars in tax havens or elsewhere thanks to a twisted interpretation of certain provisions of the Income Tax Act.
It is rather strange that these six experts are the ones who help the millionaires, that the Liberals quote them as authorities, while about fifteen others are saying that the government misinterpreted the Income Tax Act, that the public servants did something wrong in 1991 and that, with the agreement of the politicians of the time and the ones currently in office, they did not act in the interest of the true taxpayers. Things are not going well. We are in a system of institutionalized scandals. We are in a system-