Madam Speaker, my distinguished colleague, the member for Ottawa Centre, boasted naturally, as he should and by the book, about the latest budget of the Minister of Finance. However, formulating a budget is not the be all end all; the money still has to be well managed.
Quite randomly, the HDRC internal auditors pulled out 459 files, for a sort of Léger and Léger poll, and in 80% of them, they found malfeasance or dubious cases.
If we extrapolate, the figure mishandled by the Department of Human Resources Development could be between $1 billion and $3 billion.
Would the member for Ottawa Centre agree to have an outside inquiry examine the entire 11,000 files of the department, in order to shed light on this administration?
Doing so could reveal that amounts of $1 billion or $3 billion were not mismanaged, given to friends of the government as was the case in the riding of Brant, or Cornwall or Saint-Maurice, the riding of the Prime Minister.
It is very embarrassing for a government to be seen to be badly managing the Department of Human Resources Development, as it penalizes the poor workers, only 42% of whom qualify for employment insurance.
Would my colleague from Ottawa Centre agree to having a full and exhaustive inquiry—we know that 14 RCMP investigations are currently underway—so we may discover from each of the HRDC files from the past four years whether public funds have been properly managed?
Members are certainly aware that a good budget warrants having 100% of the funds well managed. The government has no right to spend public money left and right essentially to buy votes in the next election.