Mr. Speaker, we have money freely flowing from the Human Resources Development Canada offices to individuals and businesses without being properly accounted for. But for our farmers, they basically have to walk through fire to receive money from another government managed program.
The internal audit of HRDC exposed severe mismanagement of 459 job creation programs worth almost $1 billion. Some of the major problems were 80% of grant recipients showed no evidence of financial monitoring, 72% had no cash flow forecast, 87% showed no proof of supervision and 11% had no budget proposal or description of expected results. In one instance, seven people listed as unknown on the applications received $11 million. This is hard to believe.
The money flows out of the human resources development department without proper checks or balances. However, another program, the agriculture income disaster program, or AIDA as it is known, is the exact opposite. Farmers fill out, or in most cases pay their accountants to fill out, complicated forms and then submit their applications to an AIDA office. Months later the farmer finds out if he qualifies.
One producer in my riding told me his application was submitted in May 1999, but it took until March 2000 to be processed. That is almost a year. How long does it take for a human resources grant to be approved and distributed?
The AIDA applications are also heavily scrutinized. The forms go through a number of government staff and each one looks for ways to limit the payout to the farmer. In one case a farmer in my riding found out that his AIDA application had been worked on six times. By the time it had gone through bureaucrats, his payout was a fraction of what he had expected.
Does this type of scrutinizing take place at the human resources development offices when they are looking at grant applications? Is it true that the officials in charge of AIDA have been told to reduce payouts and limit benefits because it is agriculture and not HRD? There appears to be a deliberate scheme to not support farmers but to shovel taxpayers' dollars to patrons of HRD.
Should I be telling farmers in my riding to skip the AIDA procedure and go to the human resources development office for assistance?
A recent Globe and Mail article discovered 49 of Canada's top 100 most profitable companies have received grants in the past three years totalling $4.2 million from the HRDC office. Each of these companies has made a profit of at least $70 million. Do we have to show a profit of $70 million and contribute to the Liberals before qualifying for grants from the federal government?
We have farmers who are struggling to stay afloat and one of the main reasons for their problems is that the government taxes them to death and does not defend them at the international bargaining table. The government is taking dollars out of farmers' pockets and funnelling them to rich corporations.
If the government does not want to give farmers their money back, why does it not just reduce taxes? Taxes kill jobs. The grants at HRD use tax dollars which come directly from the farmer. In fact, farmers pay huge amounts of tax on the inputs they buy to grow their product. Fertilizer, fuel, chemicals and machinery all have a hidden tax component.
The grants at HRD are shovelled out through what is called a job creation fund. Let us rename this the job destruction fund. It is driving farmers off the land and many other Canadians do not have jobs because of the high taxes needed to support the Liberals' jobs destruction grants program.
It should not be easy to access public funds, but there is an obvious double standard taking place when we look at the HRDC programs and compare them to the AIDA program. I would like to know how the human resources development minister can justify handing out a billion dollars in grants with no accountability while our farmers continue to struggle and cannot access funds set aside to help them.