Mr. Speaker, I share the very deep worry and concern of my hon. colleague from Wild Rose about the plight of first nations people and his desire to go to accountability as a way of making sure that wealth is distributed and passed to those who need it. We are talking about a desperate need in these circumstances.
The problem I have is with the method, which is appointing a ombudsman who would be accountable to the department itself. If we look at our own government, we can see example after example of a lack of accountability.
We have had a military ombudsman who, a year after his appointment, still lacks a mandate. We have a military that cannot be trusted to investigate itself. We have a headline that says that an air force captain alerted the defence minister's office of impropriety but nothing was done about it. Another headline says that the top military is not accountable.
It is department after department. We have the immigration department that is barely accountable to parliament and even to its own minister.
We have MPs who cannot crack Canada's tight-lipped spy chief. We had a situation this morning about concerns around CSIS and the accessibility we have to that.
Another example was even in the smallest detail as an MP phoning and requesting some information from a minister and being told that it was confidential. My assistant had heard this particular paper being given in public just barely a week before and we were told that it was confidential. So he went to his home address and phoned for the information and it was sent out to him because the request did not come from an MP's office. That is the kind of accountability we hold ourselves to.
Another headline says that Ottawa gets around access to information requests and that the government sets a dismal example of accountability. Members of the foreign service have tried to bring forth information about misspending and inappropriate spending of funds.
Here we have a private members' bill that would hold first nations people to a level of accountability that we are not even willing to hold to ourselves. We had the Krever inquiry that led to untold suffering and death. Was there any single person ever held accountable? No. We had the Somalia inquiry shut down and nobody was held accountable. We have rapes and harassment in the military and nobody is accountable.
What is proposed is that we impose on first nations people another attachment to the Indian Act or another piece of the department, when obviously our departments are not capable of investigating themselves.
However, I do think the auditor general's office could play a very strong role if we were willing to reassess the auditor general's role in holding any financial transaction to a very strict and enforceable code of accountability.