Madam Speaker, I thank the member opposite for his question which was a little bit elaborate. I will try to answer it in reverse order.
I guess I did not make it very clear, and it is my fault, in my presentation. The report in 1995 on the grants and contributions was an excellent effort, but one of the difficulties is when we are dealing with large corporations, whether it is in industry or in government, it is very difficult to police what the average manager is doing, the rank and file manager.
While the intentions of the report were very good, and some of the recommendations were implemented, the reality in a large corporation is that there is no effective means, or has not been up until now, for the senior management, whether it is the deputy minister or the chief executive officer of a corporation, to have a really good sense of what is actually happening down in the offices and cubicles of government or the corporation.
The reason why the Internet is so important is that it offers a unique opportunity that never existed before, whereby by putting the daily operations of the rank and file managers online, all the public become the auditors. Then we would be able to see, as members of parliament or as ordinary citizens, who is getting money in a riding as they get the money. We would be able to assess the program.
One of our great problems with respect to grants and contributions which has been debated on all sides of the House was that in the old days, under a previous political party's government, grants and contributions were primarily controlled by politicians.
One of the great innovations that came in 1993 was that was basically taken away from the politicians on all sides of the House. While there was some input there was not very much input. It was primarily left to the bureaucrats to dispense the program funding in the various ridings. It applies to my riding and it applies to ridings of the opposition. That is, shall we say, a more honest process, but the problem is that it put the onus on the bureaucrats to make decisions that often they were not competent to make. So we have the dilemma of HRDC that we have right now where we have mismanagement; we have the awarding of program funds improperly; and we have poor tracking.
The solution is to put it online. If money is coming into my riding, your riding or whoever's riding, Madam Speaker, if the public can see who is receiving that money and how it is being tracked, how the services are being provided, then we will reach an enormous level of efficiency.
I do not hesitate to criticize my government on this point because I believe that my own political government is moving far too slowly in making the necessary changes in legislation to enable the bureaucrats to bring in this type of legislation. I believe the civil service wants to do it. I believe there is a very active effort out there to bring government online. It is we, perhaps, who are slow to respond.
I have to say, though, that I have not had a lot of support from the opposition benches on this. I have very much had to rely on the support of my backbench colleagues, but I think it is in all our interests to pressure government to make the appropriate changes to legislation to bring government online, which would increase transparency and accountability everywhere.
On the question of the debt, what I have to say with respect to that is that there is a fundamental difference between the Canadian Alliance and the Liberals.
I will put it to the member this way. If one were to legislate debt reduction and require every year that the debt be reduced by, let us say, $5 billion—$3 billion is peanuts when we have a $560 billion debt—what happens if a recession strikes? What happens if there is an Asian flu and suddenly the markets just fall apart?
If we have that legislation in place then we destroy the options government must have, the finance minister must have in the event of an emergency. This is again perhaps a difference between the two sides. I really believe as an individual, and I think we believe mostly as Liberals, that our responsibility as a government is to provide essential services.
It is not just about reducing taxes. It is not just about even reducing debt. The most important thing is that we have to provide services when Canadians need. If we put government into a straitjacket of legislated debt reduction we have that problem.
Then there is the opposite side of the coin. If we say, as the Alliance Party has said, that debt reduction has to be at $6 billion a year, what do we do when we have the opportunity of a surplus, as we have now, where we can reduce the debt by $10 billion and where we reduced the debt by $12 billion just recently?
I read an interesting figure on that reduction of $12 billion. That saves us $700 million in interest charges, I think it is. We are all on side here. We want to get that debt down but do not put us in a straitjacket. That does not help Canada.