Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to rise in debate on this supply day motion from my colleagues in the third party, that the House condemn the government for the very poor management brought to the attention of the Minister of Human Resources Development, notably in the allocation and use of grants for partisan purposes, and recommend the creation of an independent public inquiry commission whose members would be named by the House and whose mandate it would be to investigate the overall practices of that department and to report to the House no later than September 19, 2000.
Speaking on behalf of members of the official opposition, we intend to support this motion, although we would like to see an inquiry into this very grave matter conducted by the auditor general rather than an independent commission.
The predicate of this motion is that the government has engaged in classic pork barrel political spending of the most grotesque kind, the kind of politics which I thought a modern liberal democracy would have advanced beyond. But in fact what we see through the granting programs administered by the Minister of Human Resources Development and many of her other colleagues is that public money is increasingly being used under this government for partisan purposes. That ought not to be happening in a liberal democracy under the rule of law.
Due to the very diligent research of the official opposition, we have managed to uncover a mountain of information about the misadministration of over a billion public dollars through the human resources department. We know that because of access to information requests submitted by the official opposition special audits revealed that 80% of grants made by HRDC showed no financial monitoring, 87% showed no supervision, 97% showed no attempt to find out if the recipient already owed money to the government, 11% had no budget proposal on file and, incredibly, 15% had no application on file for money that was received from the government.
We have uncovered more and more information as the weeks have gone by. Just yesterday we revealed in the House an internal audit conducted of the TAGS program during the period 1994 to last year which revealed similar misadministration and abuse of public funds.
The Prime Minister and the minister of HRDC say that this is just an administrative error, a series of coincidental administrative errors for which the political ministry takes no responsibility and merely passes the buck to what the parliamentary secretary to HRDC yesterday referred to as lowly bureaucrats.
Not only have we seen the complete rejection of the concept, tradition and convention of ministerial responsibility, but, more shockingly, what we see when we look below the surface, when we look at these grants, is the gross politicization of granting programs of this nature.
To take an example, the number of grant approvals from the HRD department skyrocketed near the end of the last election. What a surprise. What a coincidence.
Some members may recall having seen a graph. I think it was published on the front page, above the fold, in the Ottawa Citizen some three weeks ago. It graphically represented the findings of the official opposition's research, which showed that the grant approvals and announcements were on a flat line throughout most of 1996 and 1997. Then, all of a sudden we came to April, May and June, the time of the last federal election, and there was this huge spike in the number of approvals and announcements of HRD grants.
I am sure it was just a coincidence that it was concurrent with the last federal writ being dropped in May 1997. When we look at the hard numbers, though, 592 approvals were made in April 1997 when the government knew it would drop the writ for the last general election, and that number, the 592 approvals, was four times higher than the monthly average of targeted wage subsidy approvals for the period April 1996 to August 1999.
What we see is clearly the government abusing its power, abusing its control over public resources, abusing its control of the bureaucracy to force the approval of granting programs in the targeted wage subsidies administered by HRD for its own political advantage. I find this to be really quite reprehensible.
There is further evidence. Last year the minister of HRDC's riding received over three times the national average in targeted wage subsidy money. In spite of the fact that her own riding did not qualify for any such grants, in spite of the fact that it had one of the lowest unemployment rates in the country, it was receiving more grant money than ridings with much higher unemployment rates which qualified for the program. This is more political interference.
The Prime Minister's riding, the home of the famous Versailles water fountain, the home of the hon. member for let them eat cake, received more grant money than all of the prairie provinces combined. I am sure that is just a coincidence. I am sure that all of the phone calls, faxes and letters from the Prime Minister's office to bureaucrats in HRDC asking for the expedition and approval of granting programs, some of which had not yet made application, were merely coincidental. There was no political pressure. I am sure it was just one lowly—to coin a phrase—member of parliament doing his job for his constituents. If members buy that, I have a bridge in Brooklyn for them.
Canadians do not buy that kind of evasion. Canadians know the abuse of public funds for political purposes when they see it, and they see it now in spades with the Right Hon. member for Shawinigan.
A letter from a human resources department official reveals that the Prime Minister deliberately broke the rules regarding regional distribution of grant money, because he was instructed to approve grants in the Prime Minister's riding. We see this pattern over and over again. We find that there is substantial and compelling evidence that the government has systematically engaged in the partisan use and abuse of public funds for its own political benefit. I am talking about senior ministers' ridings and the Prime Minister's riding. Grants have been forced to be approved and announced immediately before election time. This demonstrates the kind of corruption which is at the heart of the granting process.
We believe that in a modern liberal democracy, governed by the rule of law and parliamentary conventions, these kinds of pork barrel spending programs are outdated. I am sure this is news to the Prime Minister, but this is not money that belongs to the Liberal Party of Canada. It is not money held in trust by the member for Saint-Maurice. It is not money that belongs to anybody but the people who have earned it and paid for it, and who have had it taken away from them by government.
Yesterday in this place we debated the fact that the government has cut some $21 billion from health care during its tenure since 1993, all the while increasing boondoggle prone spending such as the HRDC grants. We saw in the recent budget tabled in the House by the hon. Minister of Finance that the government is going to increase boondoggle prone spending and granting programs like the transitional jobs fund and the targeted wage subsidies faster than it is going to increase spending on health care, which is by far the highest public priority. Why? Not because these programs create jobs. On average, the jobs created by these programs cost several times more than the job is actually worth on an annual basis. It is because the government is seeking to gain and maximize political partisan benefits for its members and perspective candidates in the next election. That is why we will concur and support the Bloc Quebecois motion to seek an independent inquiry, although we would rather see it conducted, as we have asked already, through the office of the auditor general, an officer of the House.
The Leader of the Official Opposition has written to the auditor general seeking such an inquiry. We hope that he will respond. If not, we hope that an independent inquiry, the likes of which are contemplated by this motion, will finally get to the bottom of this mess and this corruption.