It is called a shakedown, as the member said. He was charged with that and there was a conviction. These programs are rife with that stuff. It would not be surprising if many more instances of that turn up.
As I understand it, a special assistant in the justice minister's riding of Edmonton West by the name of Greg Fergus handled these special representations by ministers, which led to grant approvals in areas that did not strictly qualify. Justice Minister McLellan's riding received $1,350,000 and $888,000 from the transitional jobs fund even though the unemployment rate was lower than the TJF rate.
There is no accountability to taxpayers and the records are poor. This is not just sloppy, it is systemic. If a dot or a decimal is missing, that is sloppy. If it is patterned like this throughout, that is systemic. The problem the government has is that these are not just a few isolated cases. They run like a thread in terms of patronage and pork barrelling throughout the government. It is endemic.
Let us look at the recent TAGS program: 34% did not contain any proposal to support the project; 83% did not have any supporting documentation; 80% were not checked to see if recipients owed money to HRDC; and 76% did not show any evidence of financial monitoring. That was under the Atlantic groundfish strategy. Other examples could be cited from across various departments.
We believe some cover-up is going on. We have said before that the minister appeared to have misled the House. On November 17, 1999, she would have had the information in hand and had been fully briefed, yet subsequent to that, on December 1 and again on December 7, she talked about the wonderful and extraordinary job being done to make sure Canadians got back to work. What a wonderful play act. On December 7 she talked about how Canadians approved of this when she was withholding information that would have pointed to the contrary and would have exposed this whole thing.
One would have to ask, and I believe some have rightly done so, whether the minister is staying in that role because of bloodlines or genetics because her father did not fiscally manage things accurately. Significant dollars were in question when she was in the aboriginal affairs department.
The Prime Minister's spin on this whole thing is that there are only a few cases. Let us consider that the scathing audit of 459 projects is a representative sample of between 50,000 and 60,000 projects. According to Ms. Brigitte Nolet, a spokesperson for the ministry of human resources, the sample of just under 500 projects represents about 60,000. With that proportion, we still have about 4,800 that have been badly mismanaged.
This is a major problem. We cannot just minimalize it as the Prime Minister does. It is endemic. It is systemic. It is a pattern of the government and deserves to be dealt with in this manner on this day and rebuked for the good of the Canadian taxpayer.