It was Dave Dingwall, and Ritchie Mann who was the minister of transportation in the province of Nova Scotia. They transferred these funds in a very inappropriate manner and the auditor general of Nova Scotia blew the whistle.
The federal auditor general has also blown the whistle on toll highways. The auditor general has written a whole book on the highway program in general but on the toll highways in particular. It goes on and on and lists different things that were done and not done and that should not have been done.
Here are a couple of comments the auditor general made. “Transport Canada has failed to exercise the controls entrenched in the agreements under which these investments were made. We found that it has failed to discharge the leadership responsibility to co-ordinate information for the government on federal highway spending overall”. In other words, the federal auditor general said that it was chaos. He honed in particularly on the toll highways in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.
Just two weeks ago, the auditor general of New Brunswick joined the auditor general of Nova Scotia and the Auditor General of Canada. In his report he accuses the provincial Liberal government of New Brunswick of not even giving adequate consideration to options or anything else, that it just dove into this toll highway system for entirely political purposes. The auditor general has listed a long range of failings in the New Brunswick highway deal.