Mr. Speaker, there are thousands upon thousands of grants and contributions which are made. There are tens of thousands of purchases made by government.
The way the system works now, there are internal checks, but they are not very good because we cannot check internally as effectively as we can check from outside. The only outside checks are done by the auditor general and the occasional media person or MP who makes an access to information request. We have to acknowledge that the access to information law, as it exists now, is not very effective in getting the kind of information we need.
There are thousands and thousands of grants and contributions out there. If a bureaucrat decides to be sleepy at his task, or fails to send a piece of paper, or fails to do anything, the chances of him or her being discovered are absolutely minimal. The Access to Information Act is inadequate and the number of people who are actually looking are few.
However, if every time that bureaucrat had to pass a piece of paper, and that piece of paper became available on the Internet, and somebody could check it, then we would see efficiency. We would see efficiency in the government, in the bureaucracy, that would be unheard of in comparison to any corporation and in comparison to any bureaucracy in the world.