Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with my colleague the hon. member for Pictou—Antigonish—Guysborough.
The saga continues. Let us go back in time. We have heard different members get up in the House of Commons today and speak about whatever we want to call it, shovelgate, or Place du Portage gate, which is the building which houses this department, or the bunker. We could name it what we want but it is certainly a huge scandal.
Let us go back to January 19 when the minister of HRDC came into the foyer of the House of Commons and delivered the internal audit dated January 2000. That very same day I called the department for a copy of the audit and it was so kind as to send a copy to my office. Then 10 minutes later I got a phone call from the same department to tell me that I had been sent the wrong cover sheet and I was asked if I would destroy that cover sheet and throw it in the garbage. I asked to be sent the other cover sheet and I would take a look at it. When I received the other cover sheet, there was no date. The date of October 5 had been deleted. I checked with the various media to see what cover sheet they had received and they had received the one with no date.
It is obvious from that that the department was in a massive cover-up. It might be a strong word but it is certainly a lot of money. We are talking about a billion dollars here, not a million. We are talking about a billion dollars of taxpayers' money, money that people work hard for every single day, and they pay hard taxes as well. We have come to find that a billion dollars has possibly been mismanaged. I think it has been mismanaged.
We are looking at 459 cases out of 30,000 cases and 37 could be very serious. Let us do the math. The math was done to do the audit. They picked 459 different cases. If we do the math and take 37 cases out of 459 out of a universe of 30,000, that would give us 2,400 files with a problem for a possible total of $2 billion.
Two billion dollars is a lot of money and we are only talking about one department, HRDC. Out of this big universe in Ottawa, HRDC is not the only department that gives out grant money. There is Heritage Canada and industry. There is a serious problem.
We have been asking for an external audit on this. The minister sent out to the press conference yesterday the very same people she accused of being in the dark ages just the week before. I have questions for the House and the minister. Who is in charge of the department? Is it the senior bureaucrats we saw yesterday or is it the minister? We all saw the scrum coming out of the PMO last week. We have good reason to think why she was not there.
We also asked yesterday for the resignation of the minister because the buck stops there. The buck stops with her desk, not with anybody else. She accused bureaucrats of bungling this. I state in the House of Commons that when I deal with the bureaucrats in my riding, they are very thorough and very transparent. If she is going to point the finger at somebody, she had better put a mirror in front of herself and point at it. That is the person she has to blame.
We also find with this audit that there was a concentration of grants given during the 1997 electoral period, 54% to be exact. That can be put in the calculator too. Fifty-four per cent of the grants were given during an election period. It is absolutely scandalous that taxpayers' money that was supposed to go into regions affected by employment insurance reform was being used to try to elect Liberal members.