Debates of April 4th, 2000

Supply

[Steve Mahoney, Liberal, Mississauga West, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I want to change the tone of the debate a bit and the direction, because I think there is something fundamental in the nature of an opposition party which puts forward on its opposition day a motion which suggests that the government is being dishonest and that funds are not going to the right people in the communities.

I can appreciate the fact that opposition members might disagree with government programs. They might disagree with the direction we take. They might disagree with where the money goes in terms of helping certain people in the community. If I were on that side and they were on this side, I might have some questions about what was happening. That is a scary scenario, I admit, but it is obviously the role of the opposition to question and to hold government to account. I have no problem with that.

What bothers me about this almost incessant attempt to get at the HRDC grants and other government grants that are community based and go to help people in the community is that while they may succeed in the public's mind in marking up, if you will, the government, they do serious damage to the community groups and the people who need the help. Members opposite know full well that the audit procedure has improved dramatically since this government came to office. However, I do not want to stand here and spend my time simply defending the government. I want to talk about some of the programs.

We know that HRDC, for example, helps to fund the Ontario March of Dimes. What is the role of the Ontario March of Dimes? It is to help adults with disabilities integrate into the community. If that program is in jeopardy because the opposition is in hysterics about questions to do with audits and things that were actually instituted by the minister and the government, then I would suggest to members opposite that they do a disservice to that organization.

I received a frantic phone call two Fridays ago in my office on Parliament Hill from the chief administrator of the Canadian Mental Health Association. He told me that people in the area HRDC office were so frightened and afraid to move that they would not release the money so that he could pay the staff. The Canadian Mental Health Association could in fact be put in jeopardy.

We corrected the problem. We contacted the office and the money flowed in time for people to be paid and for that organization, which does tremendous work in all of our communities across Canada, to live up to its mandate. But why should it be put in jeopardy so that opposition politicians can simply mark up a minister or mark up the government, or score what some might call cheap political points?

Last Thursday evening in Mississauga I was pleased to be part of an event put on by Community Living Mississauga. Many members of the House were part of it, even some members of the opposition. A roast is held every year by members of Community Living. I think they have been doing it for 22 years. This year, as one of the roasters said, they scraped the bottom of the barrel and I was the one they were roasting.

I was delighted to be put in that position, mainly because I knew at the end of the night that the outcome would be a successful fundraising event for Community Living. Including an auction item, we raised close to $70,000 in one evening for Community Living Mississauga.

The event is vitally important because of the young people it supports, young people with mental handicaps who need help. Are these people funded directly by HRDC? No, they are not. They are funded by the social services programs at the provincial level, which are in turn partially funded by the CHST from the federal government. This is not about claiming credit and saying that we are a great government because we are giving all of this money to those groups; this is about the bottom line and the impact when the rubber hits the road in helping these young Canadians and in helping organizations deliver services to them.

A young man was born 19 years ago by the name of Tyler Williamson. Tyler was born to Laurie and Jane Williamson. He was autistic. Many people may have seen the movie Rain Man , in which Dustin Hoffman portrayed an autistic young man.

Many people would recognize the incredible talents of Mr. Hoffman in portraying that autistic young man. Tyler had those same types of gifts; not exactly the same in terms of mathematical skills perhaps, but he was a very special individual. He passed away a month ago.

Tyler fought a four-year battle with leukemia, but what he achieved in his short 19 years, by working with the organizations at Community Living, and what his mom and dad achieved, was truly miraculous. His sister, Taylor, actually donated bone marrow to him as he went through this very debilitating time.

This was a young man who, if he had not had Community Living, sure, he would have had the support of his mother and dad, his sister, and the support of his aunts and uncles and many friends. Tyler was known as the guy in charge of the keys around his dad's car dealership, Laurie Williamson Pontiac Buick in Erin Mills, Mississauga. He would take care of the keys. Everybody would run to Tyler to get the keys for the car, the back shed or whatever was needed.

He was an active young man in the community, but I would venture to say, and I am absolutely sure that Laurie, Jane and Taylor would say, that without the support of Community Living their lives would have been much more difficult. While it was a difficult time for them, and a tragic time for all to lose Tyler, there was at least some recognition that he fought a tremendous battle, not only against cancer and autism, but against attitudes in the community.

One of the important goals of Community Living is:

We believe that the whole community is enriched when people who have a handicap have opportunities to live alongside their non-handicapped neighbours.

That is so incredibly important, because the community is actually enriched as a result of young people like Tyler Williamson being able to participate in community events. The real tragedy, scandal and frightening aspect is the entire acrimonious debate surrounding the issue of precious taxpayer money. It should be on what is even more precious, the Tyler Williamson and Community Living and all the young people who benefit from it.

At the roast I was delighted to see a video with the member for Wild Rose in it showing less partisanship, having some fun. There was a purpose to the video and he understood that.

While I can disagree strongly, passionately, almost physically in some instances with the philosophies, comments and issues that are raised by the former Reform Party, I cannot believe that individually they are so inhuman as to want to jeopardize the good programs that are put in place by the men and women who work at places like HRDC or who work at social services departments in our provincial governments, funded in part by the federal tax grants that are passed on through the CHST. The mitigating damage as this flows downstream is potentially catastrophic.

I wish members opposite could come up with a motion with some teeth to it. The big issue today is health care. We should be debating that issue. Have we put enough money into health care? Are we simply writing a blank cheque to the provinces so they can reduce taxes while cutting health care? These are important issues that need to be debated here, not an issue relating to an administrative matter such as when an audit gets reported.

I ask members to think of the Tyler Williamsons of Community Living and what this money has done to help Canadians with and without disabilities right across the country.

[Garry Breitkreuz, Reform, Yorkton—Melville, SK]

Mr. Speaker, the member made the point that access to information threatens the programs he described. I would like to know how openness and transparency threatens the programs he described and the moneys that government is spending. How in the wide world can accountability of government spending threaten these programs?

[Steve Mahoney, Liberal, Mississauga West, ON]

Mr. Speaker, I have to admit that I have no idea what the member is talking about.

The government is open. Access to information is clearly available. The Internet can be used. There is no problem getting information. The government increased the number of times that the auditor general performs audits from once a year to four times a year.

That party's own member is chair of the public accounts committee on which I also sit. The auditor general brings forth extremely detailed audits on various departments that he determines he wants to audit. It is not the government and not the opposition, but the auditor general who determines which audits to bring forward.

The chair does a good job on the committee; I have no problem with him. But I am constantly amazed at the lack of research and lack of in-depth questions by members of the opposition in asking the auditor about his audits. In fact, the record would show that as a member of that committee, I ask more difficult questions in relation to government programs than they do.

If the opposition members want to get information out to their constituents, let them do their homework. Let them dig into the auditor general's reports. There is more information in them than they could possibly begin to disseminate. They could at least start by recognizing that the programs exist.

The government is open and accessible and information is clearly available to Canadians.

[Ken Epp, Reform, Elk Island, AB]

Mr. Speaker, there is a contradiction here. The member says that ATI requests, all the things we are doing, are somehow threatening these programs. Yet he turns around and says that everything is open. Either it is or it is not.

The fact of the matter is that treasury board gave instructions that these documents, including internal audits, should be made public without being asked for. The fact is that is not being done.

Second, he keeps pointing out that these are such wonderful programs. That is a debate for another day. It could well be. I agree that some of these programs are worthwhile but the political slush fund programs are not. They will come to light if there is openness and transparency. However, that is not there.

I ask the member to tell the House that he will support the motion of the day which says that there is going to be openness and accountability as already required by law. He claims it is being done but it is not. Therefore, I expect him to vote in favour of the motion today in order to make sure that what is the law will be done.

[Steve Mahoney, Liberal, Mississauga West, ON]

Mr. Speaker, the very point the member makes in referring to political slush funds makes my point. By taking grants that are used to support organizations in our community, whether it is the March of Dimes, Community Living or whatever, and effectively throwing everything into a big pot and calling it a political slush fund, denigrates the use of those funds.

When Canadians read the front page of the National Post they get excited because they somehow think the government has misplaced a billion dollars. We know that is not true, yet opposition members stand in this place every day and consistently say it even though it is not true. What they are doing is damaging the good work that is being done by all of these organizations because people get frightened. They are afraid that some reporter is going to show up. They are frightened to write a cheque even though it is a properly approved, sanctioned and processed grant that should go to those people.

In closing, if I may, Mr. Speaker, I referred to raising money for Community Living on the Thursday night. There was also a scholarship fund established, led by Jim Murray of J.J. Barnicke in the amount of $5,000 in the name of Tyler Williamson to help young people with disabilities. This is the community helping out in addition to government grants. Anyone who wants to contribute to that can contact Community Living.

[Benoît Sauvageau, Bloc, Repentigny, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I would be remiss if I did not return the serve by the hon. member for Mississauga West, who informs us that it is absolutely incorrect and totally ridiculous to say that there is a $1 billion hole in the HRDC grants.

I could agree with him to a point that he is not completely wrong on this. We do know, however, that the amount that has been lost, wasted or misspent lies between the Prime Minister's $252.11 figure and the $1 billion mentioned at one point in the media.

Is it $1 million, $2 million or $50 million? This is the figure the motion is intended to find out. We know it is perhaps not $1 billion; however, as the Prime Minister has already stated, we know it was $252.11—but he was slightly wrong in his figures—and this is what today's motion is intended to clarify.

In passing, it should be noted that the member never answered the question on whether he supported the motion or not. The question was relatively clear, there was no need for 50% of the votes plus one, just his opinion, but we will know it in due course.

I will now come back to the motion put forward by the Canadian Alliance member for Calgary—Nose Hill. For the benefit of the parliamentarians who often talk of nothing and everything and who will see that we support the motion of the Canadian Alliance—they will think it has to do with Quebec's separation—I will read you the motion. Our friends opposite often have very delicate and sensitive hearing. This is why I am going to repeat this motion slowly but surely so they may understand what we are talking about today. The motion reads:

That an Order of the House do issue for all departmental audit reports to be tabled within 15 days of their completion and permanently referred to the appropriate standing committees—

What does that mean? The motion is asking for three things. Under the Treasury Board standards, every federal department must complete an internal audit report, as did the Department of Human Resources Development.

The hon. member for Calgary—Nose Hill is asking that these internal audit reports be automatically referred to the appropriate standing committees. This means that the report from the Department of Finance would go to the Standing Committee on Finance, the report from Fisheries and Oceans would go to the Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans, and so on.

It should not be necessary for an opposition member to make a request under the Access to Information Act to have such reports released. It should be formal, normal procedure.

If I have time, I will explain later on that this is not just a wish expressed by the opposition, but rather a standard set by the Treasury Board and also a wish expressed by the auditor general.

The second thing motion is asking for is that all internal audit reports since January 1, 1999, be tabled within 15 days after the adoption of the motion. If passed, the motion would ensure that in the future all internal audit reports would be referred to the appropriate committees. This requirement would also apply to internal audit reports completed since January 1999.

Third, the motion calls for all access to information requests for internal audit reports previous to January 1999 to also be made public.

As everyone knows, this motion follows on the heels of the huge HRDC scandal, which raises many questions about how departments operate, and about their transparency as well.

I will list a series of responsibilities that must be recognized within departments. First, public officials are accountable. Ministerial responsibility ought to be restored. There is also the need for the government to be transparent, which is emphasized in this motion.

Members of the public have a right to know what is going on in the public service and particularly where their money is being spent. Too often, we hear the argument “HRDC's program and grants are a good thing because some non-profit agency in our riding received assistance, which was helpful”.

We do not have a problem with that. If $60 of every $100 does go into grants, we have no problem with that, as all the opposition parties have said. What we want, however, is for $100 of every $100 to be well spent and not $60 to help the less fortunate members of society and $40 to reward Liberals. This is clear to everyone. People want to know where their money is going.

Members are elected to represent their constituents and not just to pat the government on the back, as the member for Waterloo—Wellington does all too often, without looking any deeper. For some members, everything is just fine, and they do not look any deeper.

Opposition members, however, are public watchdogs who must keep an eye on the money spent, wasted or badly invested by the Treasury. Officials who are not elected, such as Deputy Minister Mel Cappe at the time, must also be held accountable because they are spending taxpayers' money.

This should not all fall to MPs. There are also the unelected, such as the Clerk of the Privy Council, Mel Cappe, who was Deputy Minister of Human Resources Development, negotiator for the transfer of training programs from Ottawa to Quebec, and also Deputy Minister of the Environment. If I remember correctly, I had the privilege of travelling across Canada with him on the Environmental Protection Act.

Perhaps we also need to look at what went on at Environment during his reign. This deputy minister has a long history in the federal government and we believe that unelected officials must also be answerable to the Canadian taxpayers for their actions.

This is important. I have listened to the speeches of the previous two speakers with their references to accountability, and I believe they have left out a few things, either by accident or by design.

First of all, it is important to look at how the government is obliged to be accountable. This has nothing to do with it being a good government, with their being nice guys, with their Liberal values properly. There are obligations, laws, regulations. I shall try to be very brief, because one could easily take 30 minutes on accountability alone, or even give a post-graduate course in public administration on it, but I am going to touch on it very briefly.

First we have the budget presented by the Minister of Finance. At the start of the fiscal year, the Minister of Finance presents his budget, which reveals how much money, by department, the minister and the officials may spend. Also, if we look carefully at the budget, we can often tell which programs will have money invested in them.

However, on the subject of the budget, we wonder how the Minister of Finance can announce his budget for this year, next year, the other year and so on, over five years. The U.S.S.R. used to present five year budgets, and we know what happened there recently.

What can we say about the Minister of Finance, who brings down a budget that provides for tax cuts, among other things, and who the next day says “Perhaps this will happen faster than what I forecast in the budget yesterday or the day before”. Did he present a responsible budget or not? The Minister of Finance presents a budget containing figures for the coming year. Then, something the public knows less about are the estimates, what we call the little blue books, which come out each year for each of the programs and provide more precisely how the funds in the budget will be spent.

There is also—the member for Mississauga mentioned it earlier— the Standing Committee on Public Accounts, which examines the audits and recommendations of the auditor general. I sit on the Standing Committee on Public Accounts, and it is true unfortunately that a number of members arrive at the committee less well prepared than they should be and that the committee should be as unpartisan as possible.

Each year, before appearing before the Standing Committee on Public Accounts, the auditor general reports to the House. He can now, under legislation, table four reports a year. The fact that he can table four reports a year has advantages and disadvantages.

When the auditor general tabled only one report a year, the report was expected and followed up and his recommendations got fairly considerable media attention. The disadvantage of having an annual report was that if a serious flaw in the administration of public funds were discovered early in the audit, the auditor general often had to wait eight, nine or ten months before tabling his report and reporting the flaw to the public.

So, it is a real advantage for the auditor general to be able to table four reports every year. However, because the auditor general now tables a report every three months, there is somewhat less public interest and media attention. Heaven knows that what the auditor general's reports say on the sound management of taxpayers' money in Canada and Quebec is extremely important.

When the auditor general tables his chapter by chapter report, the Standing Committee on Public Accounts reviews each chapter with designated officials. The departments must also—and this is a rather strict accountability requirement—table annual reports. Each department must table an annual report in which it explains how it intends to spend the money allocated to it by the Department of Finance.

In order to examine the departments' annual reports, to review their expenditures, parliamentarians have the right, under the Access to Information Act, to ask for documents that are not of a public nature, and they can request specific information on the management of accounts by departments.

The auditor general can also reply to written questions received from parliamentarians. My colleague, the hon. member for Kamouraska—Rivière-du-Loup—Témiscouata—Les Basques asked a very specific question to the auditor general concerning the Department of Human Resources Development and the auditor general will reply, not in his next report but in a written answer, as to whether he will pursue the matter and investigate that department.

There is also the Financial Administration Act, with which all departments must comply. We obtain a great deal of information, it is true—I have just mentioned several types of information that the government and the departments are obliged, by regulation, to release to parliamentarians—but this information system must also be improved, as the President of the Treasury Board pointed out in her report.

Members, whatever their party—Bloc Quebecois or Canadian Alliance—too often face large hurdles when requesting more critical information, information more specific to the management of public accounts.

It is important to remind members of the public that, when the auditor general tables his report, he is making observations. The auditor general cannot force the government to take specific action. There is nothing binding about his observations: they are only recommendations. So the auditor general recommends to the government that it take specific action to correct a particular situation.

In general, the recommendations made by the auditor general, who is non-partisan, are implemented by the government. But, as the auditor general pointed out in his last appearance before the Standing Committee on Human Resources Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities, in the ten years he has been making recommendations about the disbursement of grants and contributions by Human Resources Development Canada, these recommendations have not been implemented.

We can therefore see that some departments take the auditor general's recommendations into consideration and institute specific corrective action. But there are two departments which have long been corrupt and in which a miracle will be needed to put things right and they are Human Resources Development Canada and National Defence.

These will be two of the last departments that I hope and believe the auditor general will examine before he concludes his excellent work, because he is leaving us in one or two years to take up very important duties within an international organization. Perhaps he will be followed by the Minister of Finance, who knows?

In the United States, for instance, when the auditor general, or the person who has the same duties there, submits a report, the government and the various departments are required to be accountable to the public; accountability is an obligation. It can be seen that his role is far more restricted.

Here in Canada, what has happened in the past 20 years or so to modify the auditor general's role is that he has been instructed that, instead of tabling one big document once a year, he should divide it in four and report four times a year. Then they said to themselves that everything is fine, that they did not have to do anything else for another 20 years. As the auditor general was doing a good job, everything was just great. In our opinion, the auditor general ought to have closer control over government administration.

When the present auditor general, Mr. Desautels, leaves, the Liberals will be the ones to appoint his replacement for the next seven years. I am certain, I am convinced, that the Liberals are going to appoint an auditor general on his abilities, not his political allegiance. He may be in place for the next Liberal mandate, but he certainly will be there for the next government.

This auditor general needs to be recognized as impartial and non-partisan. When he makes recommendations, all parliamentarians and taxpayers must assign to them the importance they deserve.

As far as ministerial responsibility is concerned, there is a flaw as far as accountability is concerned. Only the minister currently in charge of a department are be answerable for the actions of that department. In that context, we saw how the current Minister for International Trade washed his hands of any responsibility and even refused to answer, this after having said in his adopted city of Paris “Yes, I will answer the questions that will be asked of me on this issue”. But the Minister for International Trade has said nothing.

The current Minister of Human Resources Development said “I do not have to answer, because this did not take place under my administration”. When things start to heat up in a department, they change ministers, thus avoiding having to answer questions.

What happened at Human Resources Development? An internal audit report was tabled, as is required. They did not do so because they are nice people or because they wanted to see how things were going in their department. Internal audit reports are important documents and they are compulsory.

The minister had known about the internal audit report for a long time, but the information was only disclosed on February 21. Was there a cover up attempt? We have our opinion on this, but let us say that I am merely raising the question. As we know, asking the question often brings the response. Did they hope these data would not become public in the House of Commons? What data are contained in the internal audit report? It is this report that is the model for the other reports we want tabled in this House.

Seven categories of programs were analyzed in the report. The programs analyzed totalled grants and contributions of around $1 billion a year for three years. There is therefore $3 billion in programs that were analyzed.

The internal audit report prepared by officials within the Department of Human Resources Development revealed significant problems in program management. Grants were awarded when no application had been made.

I asked people in my riding “Is it easy to obtain a grant from the federal government before you apply?”. They replied “It is so hard to get one when you have applied that if you get $252.11”, as the Prime Minister pointed out, “and you spend $250, they want the $2.11 back and they are after you until you have paid back the $2.11”. Management at HRDC is so efficient with quotas that they can even cut benefits to the unemployed.

At section 6.5.1 of a Treasury Board internal document on internal auditing, the President of the Treasury Board asks the government and says that departments should expect these internal reports will be made public, not only under the Access to Information Act, but by the intrinsic desire of the various departments to make them public, as the motion by our colleague from the Canadian Alliance requests.

She asks to have these reports be released to parliamentarians and the Canadian public so that we may know where the money goes and ensure that the money duly earned by Canadian taxpayers which is paid in taxes to the federal government is wisely invested.

[Jean-Guy Chrétien, Bloc, Frontenac—Mégantic, QC]

Mr. Speaker, the member for Repentigny has given us an overview of spending and of the money that makes its way into the Minister of Finance's coffers.

He mentioned the scandal at Human Resources Development Canada, with its new minister who is unfortunately not very up on matters or familiar with all the issues, because it was her predecessor who was responsible. But since he is afraid to answer, it is left to the minister or her parliamentary secretary to field questions.

I congratulate the member on giving the background and telling us about the one to three billion dollars that were probably misspent. I would also like to know what the member for Repentigny thinks about the advertising inserts the federal government sprang for in all Ontario's daily newspapers in an attempt to pin the blame directly on Ontario's premier, Mike Harris.

This advertising appeared in both languages and I cite the part in black “Last year, the Government of Canada's share of Ontario's health care spending was 55%”.

These are only numbers of course and sometimes a malicious spin is put on them. What premiers and provincial finance ministers want is for payments to be restored to 1994 levels.

They are not asking for an increase. They know that budgets have been slashed. Jean Charest, when he was here, said that, if Canada's health care system was in disarray, the Prime Minister, and he pointed at him, was responsible. He pointed at the Prime Minister, the member for Saint-Maurice, as he said this.

Today, the federal government has paid for advertising in all of Ontario's daily newspapers. This will cost goodness only knows how much, probably the better part of $1 million. Instead of putting this money into health care, it is going after Mike Harris, probably to damage his credibility with Ontario voters.

I would like to know what the member for Repentigny thinks about this.

[Benoît Sauvageau, Bloc, Repentigny, QC]

Mr. Speaker, I thank the hon. member for Frontenac—Mégantic for his question. The government shows partisan leanings too often, with examples such as this.

Last week, however, there was a federal-provincial meeting of ministers of health, focusing on Canadians' urgent priorities in connection with the health system. A consensus was reached—and this is often what people hear, or want to hear from the government, as my colleague from Frontenac—Mégantic has said—on the restoration of transfer payments for health care.

The federal Minister of Health said “It is not my responsibility any more. It is up to the premiers”. The Prime Minister said “A meeting is scheduled in August or September, and I will discuss it with my provincial counterparts at that time”.

We can see the contempt with which the government treats matters that are under provincial jurisdiction, according to the Constitution, in this instance health. When we call for the restoration of transfer payments, they come at us with all kinds of figures.

I do not want to say that the government is robbing people, for that would be unparliamentary language. I will, however, give an example from outside parliament. I put it this way to the people in my riding “It is sort of like someone stealing $100 from me, then coming back in a week or two to tell me he would give me back $20”. As if I were supposed to be grateful that he stole just $80. That is more or less what the government is saying to us “Come on now, I borrowed money from you without your permission, but you need to thank me because I am giving one-quarter of it back, or one-third, or some other amount”.

What we are asking is to have back, not the interest on the money borrowed without our permission, but the money itself.

In conclusion, to complement the motion by the Canadian Alliance member, section 6.5 of the Treasury Board manual, which I was not able to read earlier, provides, and I quote:

In accordance with the principles of the Access to Information Act, government information should be available to the public. Departments should develop cost-effective means—

I do not know what cost-effective means in this context.

—to ensure that review reports are accessible to the public without requiring a formal request under the Access to Information Act.

This is a request by Treasury Board to make public internal audit reports “without requiring a formal request under the Access to Information Act”.

The government is being asked to do as the President of the Treasury Board asks, apply the policies of this government and the wishes of this government.

As members will see, consistent as they are, the Liberals will not apply their policy, they will not support their request and will not apply the standards set by the Treasury Board. It is a bit of a paradox.

[Pat Martin, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

Mr. Speaker, the opposition day motion by the former Reform Party, as I understand it, calls for an audit of all government programs to be tabled in a more prompt fashion and for better and easier access to information.

Our caucus does not disagree with either of those points. They are both valid points. However, after reading the motion this morning at our caucus meeting my first reaction was that it was a waste of a good opposition day. What a terrible thing to squander an opportunity to hold the government accountable on so many pressing issues. What a shame that party is so devoid of ideas that it has to nitpick about relatively insignificant things when there are so many pressing issues that we could be talking about in the House of Commons today.

After reading the motion I felt that it was very poorly crafted. I could hardly understand what it meant, and once I did understand, I thought it was a shame. We could have used this time today. It must be one of the luxuries of being the official opposition in that it has more opportunities for these opposition day motions. We do not treat our opposition days lightly. If my party had been given the opportunity to choose the topic of debate for a whole day in this hallowed Chamber, I would like to think that we would have found something of more significance.

We could talk for a day about a national housing strategy and about being the only developed nation in the world that has no national housing strategy. We could talk about a commitment to full employment and about putting the whole country back to work. Would that not be a theme worth dedicating one day of debate to?

There are so many issues. We could talk about saving our national health care system. Why are we not talking about that in this golden opportunity we have to choose the topic of debate? We could talk about cleaning up the environment. How often do we hear that debated in the House of Commons while we, as Canadians, are busy poisoning our own nest to the point where we will not be able to live here anymore if we do not do something about it? That is not being debated in the House of Commons today.

Frankly, we are talking about nitpicking. We are talking about little incidental administrative details. Is that the worst thing that party can think of to accuse the ruling party of, that they are poor administrators? How cruel. What a condemning comment. What a waste of an opportunity and it saddens me.

I will speak to the motion because, as I said, we do not disagree with the idea of more accountability and transparency, although those words are getting to be such a cliché that I am not sure they have any meaning anymore. They are the two most overused words in the House of Commons.

We agree with the whole concept of increased accountability on spending on government programs. We do agree with the former Reform Party. What does one become when one is no longer a reformer? If one is no longer interested in that anymore, one must be a conformer. The opposite of a reformist is a conformist. Maybe that is what we should be calling them now.

We do come from diametrically opposed positions. Our party and that party may agree on this one issue of increased access to information, et cetera, but it is very transparent. The one thing that is truly transparent is what motivated the Reform Party to debate this motion today. It is not even a call for greater accountability. It is that it disagrees with government spending on social programs.

What it boils down to and the reason the Reform Party keeps hammering mercilessly away at government spending is that it disagrees with public investment in a human resources strategy at any level. It disagrees with public spending whether it is for human resources, income maintenance or access to services for the disabled. Any public spending is bad. All things private are good. If one tears down the former Reformers' political ideology, that is about as basic as it can be put. Public bad; private good. No more public spending is really what their message is.

We disagree wholeheartedly because our party believes that government not only has a role in public spending for social services but it has an obligation. One of the finest things we do as government is that we do our best to distribute the wealth to care for those who need it most in our communities.

The one thing that is very obvious and transparent about the former Reform Party is that if it ever did have the authority, heaven forbid—

[Ken Epp, Reform, Elk Island, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order. I think it is really a very simple thing to get the name of the party right. The Speaker ruled somewhat over a week ago and ruled again when the name was being misused. The name of the party is Canadian Alliance and it is not asking a great deal to have the member just follow that Speaker's ruling.

[The Acting Speaker (Mr. McClelland)]

I am sure the hon. member for Winnipeg Centre is duly admonished.

[Pat Martin, NDP, Winnipeg Centre, MB]

Mr. Speaker, I am happy to co-operate. I will call the party by its proper name.

One thing I would ask the movers of the motion today to take into consideration is that one of the reasons we are having a difficult time administering complicated government programs might be the fact that the ruling party, the government, has been cutting, hacking and slashing jobs in the public sector to such a degree that it is perhaps getting more difficult to actually do the necessary follow up on these programs. Under the questions and comments portion of my speech, perhaps we could talk about that somewhat. How can we possibly take 50,000 jobs out of the public sector, increase the workload and still expect the same access to services?

The public sector has been cut, reduced and slashed to the point where even right-wing analysts are looking at the public service and wondering if they have gone too far; if they will have to do a massive hiring to try to plug some of the massive holes that were left.

Every time the government cuts the public sector it seems to cut the people who are most valuable, the people in the middle band of experience, the people who have been there for 20 years and maybe would take an early option, an opportunity to retire earlier. We cannot replace those people overnight. It is not like flicking a light switch on and off. Once we cut those 50,000 jobs we cannot just say tomorrow that we went too far and we should get them back. They are not coming back. They have already slipped away and the damage has already been done. We are fond of saying that some cuts do not heal. The cuts to the public sector will not heal easily and certainly not overnight.

Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for Vancouver East.

One of the real motivations that the official opposition had in putting this motion forward was to draw criticism again to public spending programs like the transitional jobs fund. This is a sensitive point for myself as well coming from the riding of Winnipeg Centre. We were horrified to learn, even though we are the third poorest riding in the country, with unemployment levels of 13% and 14%, the third lowest per capita income per family and the highest incidence of poverty, that we did not qualify for any of the transitional jobs fund money. We were just as horrified as anybody else that the Minister of HRDC's riding qualified with an unemployment rate of about 7% and my riding, with an unemployment rate of almost 14%, did not qualify. The public certainly needed to know that something untoward was going on with that one particular program.

When the government was pressed on the issue more and more facts started to surface, things that people cannot be comfortable with. All Canadians were shocked as the truth started to surface. The House leader for the government side had his binder ready and any time a member from one of the ridings stood up to question this, it would be thrown back to the member “You probably qualify for all kinds of other grants. You might not get any transitional jobs fund grants but you do get other kinds of HRDC spending”. We do and we appreciate that.

In the process of this debate, we learned that my riding gets more HRDC funding than any other riding in the country. I am quite proud of that. It means that the people in my riding have been aggressively trying to get some federal spending going on in the inner city of Winnipeg. As transfer payments are cut or reduced year after year, we needed to get that flow of dollars coming to us in some way or another. Thankfully, the people in my riding have been creative enough, quite often with the help of our office, to avail themselves of the various programs that can help the situation in my riding.

We have watched the federal transfer payments dwindle. In the short time that I have paying attention to politics, we have seen the established program funding system chucked out the window and in its place we saw the Canada health and social transfer.

This is something that the National Council on Welfare called the most disastrous social policy initiative this country has ever seen. It could see the writing on the wall that when the Canada health and social transfer came in there was going to be trouble. Really what the federal government was trying to do was distance itself from any obligation to social spending across the country and to offload that burden on to the provinces.

First the government provided block funding for health, post secondary education and social services, then it started dwindling it away. From $19 billion worth of CHST, with the bat of an eye it went to $11.5 billion per year for all the provinces. Now the government is slowly inching it back up a billion at a time. I think it is back up to $14.5 billion in total spending.

We are supposed to toot the government's horn and cheer that it is going to put some of the money back which has been cut so drastically from that side of social spending, but really it is still four or five billion dollars short from when the CHST was initiated in 1996.

So it is a bit of a smoke and mirrors game and it leaves us no choice but to aggressively go after any kind of program spending that we possibly can in the riding of Winnipeg Centre.

To sum up my brief remarks today, I am disappointed that the Reform Party, or the former Reform Party, could not have been more creative in choosing a topic for debate today. It certainly must be completely devoid of ideas if the worst thing it can accuse the government of is being poor bookkeepers. There are plenty of other travesties that the government is guilty of which we would love to point out had we the opportunity to choose the subject of debate today.

[Libby Davies, NDP, Vancouver East, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I rise today after my colleague from Winnipeg Centre, a former member of the CCF, to speak in support of the motion that is before us.

I want to begin my remarks by saying that I just came from the human resources development committee where we had the President of the Treasury Board appearing before the committee. It is quite an interesting debate that is taking place to really examine the relationship of a department like HRDC with the treasury board and to try to figure out what rules are in place to ensure that there is financial accountability for the expenditure of public funds.

Just a couple of weeks ago we had the auditor general before that committee. He said:

I cannot help but express frustration with the way the government manages grants and contributions in general. Our audit work in various departments back to 1977 has identified persistent shortcomings, from problems with compliance with program authorities to weaknesses in program design, instances of poor controls, and insufficient measurements and reporting of performance. We continue to find many of the same kinds of problems each time we audit grant and contribution programs. The recent internal audit at HRDC again pointed to the same types of problems.

I think that is a real condemnation of the way the government has managed grants and contributions and the expenditure of public funds. Although this motion before us today is fairly narrow in scope, I think it does afford us the opportunity to examine in a public realm, and to bring to public light, the inner workings of government.

As my colleague from Winnipeg Centre said earlier, obviously the issue that we are grappling with is not just an issue of financial administration and financial management. It is also an issue of political management of grants and contributions in HRDC.

From the very beginning of this scandal, the members of the New Democratic Party have been very clear in calling for a full disclosure of information. In fact, the motion before us today is within that realm of trying to ensure that there are procedures in place to make sure that audits are tabled in a timely manner and that access to information is provided in a timely manner.

Looking back over the debate that has unfolded in the last more than two months, it is amazing that in the beginning weeks members of the opposition had a hell of a time even getting information about moneys that were spent in the transitional jobs funds, the Canada jobs funds and other human resource development programs. Member after member got up in question period and in committees, and in the media through access to information, tried to pull that information out from the government in order to get a sense of what the picture was really about.

I remember the government House leader, with his huge binder, slipping the pages to the Prime Minister so that information could be doled out little bit by little bit, as it suited the government. I thought to myself, what a travesty of the way to do public business.

The issue of public disclosure, of transparency in government workings, of financial administration as an important part of a democratic institution, parliament, is of great concern to Canadians. Maybe a couple of years ago somebody would have looked at a motion like this and asked why we would want to debate it. But I think this motion and what is underneath it, the substance of what lies beneath it in terms of the very political management of these huge funds, is something that more and more Canadians are very concerned about.

I also want to say that the NDP from the very beginning has not only called for disclosure and a full audit by the auditor general, it has also made it very clear that from its point of view it supports public expenditure of funds on job development and job creation programs. It thinks that it is a wise and credible way in which to expend public money but the problem is it must be done in a way where the rules are clear, consistent and where there is transparency so that Canadians can be assured, no matter what region or city they are in, that the rules operating in their region are the same as the rules in another region, with the understanding of course that there are differences across the country.

One of the things that has really concerned me, representing a riding that has high unemployment and very high poverty levels, is that Vancouver East, my riding, did not qualify for transitional jobs funds apparently until we found out that these pockets of unemployment existed.

It has really been a very disturbing exercise to unravel and to deconstruct what has happened with the grants and contributions program and to learn that not only were audits and recommendations from the auditor general's office ignored for more than 20 years, but that the rules that have been put in place seem to be made up as the government goes along. They seem to be made up in a way that is convenient to suit the political fashion of the day, to dole out some money here or there and, interestingly enough, to very profitable large businesses.

Job development and job creation should be community based. We have the reality that of the 100 most profitable businesses in Canada, 49 of them received some kind of grant or contribution from the federal government. I think most Canadians would kind of scratch their head and ask, what is the priority there? I could think of many other instances where those funds could be better expended to create long term sustainable jobs in a local community.

The other matter that I want to mention briefly is, as we have now sort of uncovered what is going on in HRDC and recognize the magnitude of the problem and the scandal that has unfolded, what has not come out very strongly is the fact that the decisions by the Liberal government to cut back the civil service has really had an impact as well.

Just a couple of days ago I had a visit from the Financial Administration Offices Association that worked for the federal government. It pointed out some quite alarming facts. These are folks who provide financial administration. They are the folks who within the system should be in a place to figure out when things are going wrong and to provide the necessary financial controls. What I found out from the association is that it has suffered major cutbacks of about one-third which has seriously impaired its ability to work effectively within various departments to make sure that the necessary financial controls are in place. That is just one small instance of how this picture has gone so terribly wrong.

I want to say in closing that the NDP supports the opposition motion that is before us today, but clearly we do not believe that it goes far enough. This is just the tip of the iceberg. We want to see timely audits that are made public. We want to make sure that MPs and parties are not running around in circles trying to get access to information. We do not want to see 10,000 pages of material dumped on members that it is very difficult to make any kind of sense of. This is about democratic disclosure. It is about ensuring that there is transparency in government operations.

More than that, it is also about political accountability of the minister and of the government to ensure that these public funds are expended in a way that is fair, open and consistent. The evidence shows us that this clearly has not been the case.

We will support the motion and we will also continue to bring forward other issues and questions about the management of funds in HRDC.

[Scott Brison, Progressive Conservative, Kings—Hants, NS]

Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the hon. member for Brandon—Souris.

It is with pleasure today that I speak on this votable supply motion which will effectively encourage and instil a greater sense of accountability in this place. I think it is extremely important that we should expect from governments at least the same level of accountability, and I would suggest an even greater level of financial accountability that we expect from private corporations. Private corporations and publicly traded corporations require through the auditing process a greater level of accountability in terms of their bookkeeping and the auditing of their statements than in fact this government seems to deem appropriate.

There has been a secular decline in the role of the private member since the late 1960s. Commensurate with that there has been an increased amount of power in the cabinet and ultimately in the PMO. As such, there has been a reduction in the level of parliamentary scrutiny over spending and again starting in the late 1960s.

I would argue it would benefit all members of the House and all Canadians, regardless of political affiliation, if we were to restore greater levels of parliamentary accountability over spending.

There was a time when the estimates for departments were debated here in the House of Commons, scrutinized by committee of the whole. I would propose, as we did in the PC party's prebudget position last year, that we should restore a system which would provide the ability for parliament to actually scrutinize the estimates of a certain number of departments each year in the House of Commons without a time limit. This would ensure that first, the minister has to be very aware of what is going on within his or her department, but also that Canadians who are paying among the highest taxes, business and personal taxes, in the industrialized world, will be ensured that their money—again, it is their money, it is not the government's money—is being invested or spent in ways that are consistent with the goals and the aims of Canadian taxpayers.

Whether one agrees or disagrees with the nature of some of the government spending is immaterial in some ways. What is most important, and what the motion speaks to, is that whatever government spending occurs the government is held accountable through an audit process that is open, transparent and clear to Canadians on an ongoing basis to show that the government is maintaining taxpayer money in a way that is appropriate.

The PC Party is supporting the motion. The accountability issue is critical. We should not have to go through what we went through in recent weeks with the HRDC debacle in trying as members of parliament to get information that should have been available openly, transparently and instantly, and then having the dissemination of an immense amount of information in one day, to the extent that it almost became impossible to absorb and deal with it in an effective way. This kind of information should be available on an ongoing basis and all Canadians would benefit from it.

The motion addresses some of the issues from the perspective of parliamentary involvement in this very important area of spending, but we would like to see parliament move further in this direction. We would like to see the restoration of the right to debate the estimates in the House of Commons and in committee of the whole, which would provide greater levels of scrutiny over the spending of taxpayer money. This would also increase the role of the private member whether that member was sitting on the backbenches of the Liberal government or on the opposition benches. It would benefit all of us.

In these times of hyper competitiveness on the global stage when taxes are comparatively higher in Canada than they are for our trading partners, we must recognize it becomes doubly important that taxpayer money be spent in such a way that Canadians are aware of where the money is being spent. The government should take very seriously its fiduciary role in maintaining the proper levels of financial procedural control over these investments.

The motion goes in the right direction, but we should also reconsider the involvement of government departments. Prior to the HRDC scandal I was not aware of the degree to which the government was clearly involved in projects that it should not have been involved in. I was naive enough to believe that a lot of the pork barrelling and use of taxpayer money to buy support in an election had subsided. I thought we were in a new age and that all parties in the House recognized the importance of creating sound economic policies and environments to create economic growth.

Direct government involvement in investing in some of these businesses may have been considered less important or less effective than it would have been at one point. I saw some of the most egregious examples of government spending with HRDC. I think $500,000 were given to Wal-Mart to build a store that it would have built anyway. I forget the exact sum but I believe $300,000 were given to a company to move 30 kilometres from one member's riding to a minister's riding.

Some of these examples smack of the type of old style politics of which Canadians have been skeptical. They have lost faith in governments and institutions. Any structure we could put in place to ensure greater levels of procedural accountability and audit accountability would be very positive.

We in the PC Party are supporting the motion. We hope it is just one of a number of steps that we can take to create in a multi-partisan or non-partisan way greater levels of accountability and scrutiny over taxpayer money in parliament.

[Rick Borotsik, Progressive Conservative, Brandon—Souris, MB]

Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to speak to this supply day motion from the party formerly known as Reform. In fact the motion should have been put forward. I heard a previous speaker from the New Democratic Party suggest that it was unnecessary to bring the issue before the House and that there were other priorities and other issues that we could be talking about which certainly had a greater resonance now with Canadians.

I disagree to a certain extent because this issue certainly does resonate with Canadians. It speaks to the specific management capabilities of the government of the country to control and put into place the necessary services required by Canadians. There has to be some control over that either in the House with parliamentarians or with administrators at the top of departments.

I am a fan of internal efficiency audits. If I can go back a bit into a previous lifetime when I was involved in municipal politics, my administrator of the day and I set up a complete process by which we would identify specific departments within that municipal entity and then put into place internal efficiency audits.

Why we did that was not to witch hunt. We did not suggest that we or outside auditors could do the job any better. We looked at the operations with different eyes, especially operations that have been in place for a long time. Whether it be municipal governments, provincial governments or the federal government, there is a tendency, if the bureaucracy has been in place for a while, to do the job by taking the path of least resistance.

The path of least resistance may not necessarily be the best way to attain the necessary efficiencies within the department. Bringing in outside eyes allows someone else to see how better the operation could run. It is not a witch hunt. It is simply a matter of listing the way the job is completed now, the numbers of steps that have to be taken for necessary approval processes and perhaps identifying ways of doing the job better.

That is what happens in the federal government with the auditor general's department. I am a fan of the auditor general. Mr. Desautels does his job extremely well. Members of his staff are extremely competent. When they go into a department they do not go in for a witch hunt. They go in simply to look at the operations and say what could be done better or what could be done in a different fashion.

A lot of what has been said today in the House has a tendency to focus on HRDC because it has been the audit that has been put forward with the most regularity over the last two months and has identified certain deficiencies within the particular department.

HRDC is just one of the departments within the federal bureaucracy. Let me give a little example. The auditor general, Mr. Desautels, appeared before the agriculture committee last week. Four specific departments of agriculture were there. Mr. Desautels and his staff went through the audit with us as members of that committee and highlighted some of the areas where we could improve upon the service delivery of those departments, whether it be on cost recovery, which we have talked about in the House at great length in terms of agriculture, or whether it be an accounting process which in fact would bring forward some deficiencies within the department.

When the committee questioned the departments it was given some commitments from those departmental heads, which I expected to have regardless. We had an audit. We showed them the deficiencies. They were responsible to put into place in their departments changes within their operations to try to comply with those recommendations. They told us as committee members, as parliamentarians, that they would comply with those recommendations.

I asked the auditor general a question and he said that he was very glad to hear that the departments would comply with those recommendations. I was a bit shocked because I assumed it was automatic that the departments would follow the auditor general's recommendations and make the necessary changes, but that is not the way the system works. There has to be a watchdog. There has to be a backstop. The parliamentarians in committee are the watchdog and the backstop.

I was pleased to be able to say to the departmental heads that we would follow up on it on a regular basis over the next 12 months and that we would insist their operations become more efficient. The auditor general certainly thanked us for the job we performed in the whole process.

The motion today speaks specifically to that requirement of parliamentarians. It simply says that when we have an internal efficiency audit we must make sure the audit is tabled with the committee within 30 days of its being presented to the department.

I cannot for the life of me understand why any member of the sitting government would not agree with that. It is their job as well as our job to make sure that internal audits which give efficiency reports are seen and are acted upon. To hide them or not to react to them is a dereliction of duty. It is an abdication of duty. It is necessary that those reports be tabled, so why would the government not agree on its own behalf to ensure proper timeline and the process?

When we did internal audits at the municipal level we made them available to the department to put forward its comments on the recommendations. We then took the audits, the recommendations from the auditor and the reports from the departmental heads on the way they would comply with the recommendations, to council and ultimately to the public. Those were done in a necessary process. The public demands and the public deserves to know exactly how services are being delivered and that the money is being expended in an efficient manner. That is all the motion speaks to.

All the motion says is that when we do an internal audit, which we want to have, with which we agree and which we say Mr. Desautels has the mandate, the right and the requirement to put forward to the public, we should ask him to bring it forward to the departments. That is fair ball. It should be taken to HRDC, to agriculture, to finance, to the treasury board, to defence or to any department he wants to, so that the departments can look at the recommendations, put their comments forward and in 30 days report the audit back to committee. Where better can we deal with an audit than publicly at a committee table? There is absolutely no reason the government should oppose that type of resolution.

My hon. colleague from Kings—Hants spoke eloquently with respect to the private-public requirements and to the fact that as a federal government we were the watchdogs of the public purse. That is the absolute essence of what the audit speaks to, the watchdog of the public purse.

If the government is not prepared to bring forward audits in a timely fashion then it is saying that we as parliamentarians should not be the watchdog of the public purse. That is wrong, absolutely wrong. I would ask hon. members to support the resolution as in fact our party will support it.

Let us talk just briefly about access to information.

Access to information has been a very important tool for us and members of other parties. We require access to information because the departments have not been forthcoming when we have asked for information with respect to audits and other information. I would prefer not to have to file another access to information request in my life in parliament. Then I could honestly say to my constituents and other constituents in this great country that there is openness and transparency.

Earlier it was said that access and transparency are probably the two most overworked words in parliament and I agree. We should be working toward correcting the inefficiencies and making sure it is open and accessible.

[Ken Epp, Reform, Elk Island, AB]

Mr. Speaker, the two members of the party who spoke touched on it briefly. Perhaps they would explicitly comment on the response of the government today that this is a vexatious waste of time and that the motion we have brought forward is unnecessary. That totally ignores the fact, and I stress the word fact, that access to information requests are long overdue and are past the 30 day limit as required by law. Yet the Liberal government members are denying this.

I would like to have the member comment on the Liberal government's ineptness. I do not want to use that word but it is really mismanaging the financial affairs of the country. It is in continual denial.

[Rick Borotsik, Progressive Conservative, Brandon—Souris, MB]

Mr. Speaker, the member for Elk Island is absolutely correct. I would like to indicate to the member for Elk Island that the members who spoke are from the Progressive Conservative Party rather than that other party, but we support the motion before us today.

I agree. To simply refer to this as vexatious speaks to the attitude of the government when it says because we question the ability for other members, opposition members as well as backbench members, to get information on a particular department that we are interfering with the operations of the government. That is not correct. We must make the government and bureaucrats accountable for public dollars that are spent.

To be perfectly honest, I am surprised that the Liberals will not stand up and support this. It is just good management. It is good management tactics that are done in any private or public corporation. Why the government would hide audits, hide access to those audits or not allow those audits to be available to members of parliament really disturbs me. It is saying that it will reward inefficient management, it will not question it and it will continue in the same fashion it has been doing over the last seven years.

The member for Elk Island is absolutely correct. The terms that have been used by the government should not be used with respect to this particular motion.

[Ken Epp, Reform, Elk Island, AB]

Mr. Speaker, it is again my honour to stand in the House to speak to a very good motion. The motion before us is an interesting one. It puts the government of the day into the dilemma of either voting for the motion which makes good sense, or voting against it which means that it wants to continue its policy of cover-up and not dealing honestly and openly with all of the facts on many financial issues that have come forward from time to time.

One of the best ways of providing accountability in government is to have openness. When some access to information requests that I put in were returned to me, we were dismayed that there was so much whiteout. In fact there were pages and pages of blank paper. The code on the blank paper was that it was personal and therefore could not be disclosed.

My contention was then, is now and shall continue to be that the instant it is public money, it should become public information. In other words when I as a member of parliament spend my office budget, I believe that office budget should be accessible to the public. The people of my riding should know how their member of parliament managed the money that was entrusted to him for managing his office.

The minister of a department must account properly not only for his or her own expenditures with respect to the manner in which the minister handles the ministry but also the expenditures within the ministry.

Mr. Speaker, I just noticed that my colleague has arrived so I now want to inform you that I will be sharing my time with the hon. member for Prince Albert. I did not want to advise you until he was physically here because I could easily speak for 20 minutes on this issue.

Many years ago when my wife and I were first married we moved to a little town in Alberta called Duchess. It had a population of some 200 people. It was a really good town and had a lot of fine people. One of my friends from the big city asked how I could stand to live in that little town with everyone knowing what I was doing. I shrugged my shoulders and said “I do not plan on doing anything bad so it does not matter. Let them know what I am doing”.

In that small town I was the whole math department in the high school; I was the department head and the total staff. I did that job for three years in that delightful community. We have many fond memories. We are looking forward to going to a reunion of the class I had way back in the early sixties. It is hard to imagine that those youngsters are now in their forties and fifties. I will be really interested in picking up on that and seeing how they are.

I was accountable. When I walked down the street everybody knew the math teacher was walking from his home to the school. It was such a small town that I lived on the east edge of town and the school was on the outskirts of the west end and it took me five minutes to walk there. It was a wonderful time. It underlined my basic philosophy which I have learned from home which is that one deals openly and honestly with people.

I find it distressing that we have this motion today. First of all, as one of the Liberal members said, it should be redundant. He said it is redundant. I would change the wording simply to say that this motion should be redundant. We should not have to use a day of debate in the House of Commons to debate a motion which says that the government should obey the law.

We do not do that in any other case. We do not say to citizens that today we are going to have a debate and we want people to obey the law about murdering others, or on another day we are going to debate that people should obey the law and not steal from others. We do not revisit old bills, motions and government decisions in this way for other things.

There has been a blatant breach of treasury board guidelines and of decisions which are properly made and should be enforced. Here we are as the official opposition debating whether or not the government should actually obey the law, whether it should obey the rules. My very strong contention is that it should.

Some time ago treasury board put out a directive saying these internal documents which are basically report cards on the operation of the departments should be made public. It should not be necessary to file access to information requests in order to access them.

It is quite ironic that the government will make that decision. It will have a big fanfare when announcing that decision and will say to the people of Canada “Look how wonderful and accountable we are. Here we are offering information”. That is wonderful. It makes a great press release. It makes a great press conference. But what happens when it comes time to release the document? It is not released. The government just does not do it, hence the motion today. Why does the government not insist that the departments follow treasury board guidelines? One of them is being breached.

To make matters worse, when some member of the public, or in our case a member of the official opposition, files an access to information request to get the information that should be public anyway, we are stonewalled. We hit a wall. We know one thing that happens is as soon as such a request goes in, there is a heads up to the minister. We know that. The very first response is “Get the ministerial staff informed. The minister may have to answer questions because the official opposition or some other member of the opposition is raising a question so we had better make sure that we have our spin doctors out”.

It is absolutely ludicrous that the government is much more interested in putting a spin on the facts than simply revealing and dealing with the facts. It is a contradiction of the whole concept of accountability. It basically says that the government wants the people to believe what they hope would be true instead of the government saying it would like the people to know what is true. There is a vast difference in those two concepts. The government often says, “We are so open, look at this directive”. As I said, it looks good on the surface but it would look so much better if it were actually practised.

To paraphrase the HRDC minister, on numerous occasions she has said “We are so wonderful, we released this request for access to information on the HRDC internal audit before it was requested”. To be very blunt, that was not true. We got a copy of a memo that had been doctored. We cannot prove that it was but the suspicions are surely there because the document speaks of the date of reference and says “We received your request on” and I think it was January 23 or January 22, but the date of the memo is January 21. It was the day before. They forgot to change the date on top when they issued the public document.

That, to me, is evidence of a cover-up. What they are saying is “Let us quickly produce a document that proves our case”. Using a word processor they changed one date but forgot to change the date at the top. As a result they were speaking of the next day in the past tense. One has to be psychic to do that or guilty of forging a document. It is part of the cover-up.

The government wants people to believe that it is honest, open and accountable and all that. We want it to be and that is what today's motion is all about.

[Clifford Lincoln, Liberal, Lac-Saint-Louis, QC]

Mr. Speaker, would the member who just spoke agree that treasury board has in place a directive that all audits once completed are released immediately? Also treasury board went even further and said it would review all the internal audit procedures and report to the House by June 2000 to make the policy even more effective and enforceable.

Surely the member will agree that the very clear intention of the government is to make internal audits available as soon as they are completed. Members opposite do not have to wait even for 15 days or go to the Access to Information Act.

[Ken Epp, Reform, Elk Island, AB]

Mr. Speaker, the member has asked if I would not agree that the government has this in place. The answer is, yes, to the best of my knowledge it does.

The distressing part is that it has had it in place for some four or five years. Treasury board policies announced in a May 25, 1994 letter of decision read in part:

To simplify the process for acquiring copies of reports, and to deliver on the government's commitment for more openness, the policy requires that departments make the final version of review reports, including internal audit and evaluation reports...accessible to the public, without requiring a formal access request.

That is right from the letter of decision dated May 26, 1994. It has been in place for six years and the government is not doing it.

The member asked if I would not agree that the government has it as part of its policy. Yes, I agree that it is part of its policy. The motion today is that the government do it. That is it, do it. Do it, do not just say it.

[Derrek Konrad, Reform, Prince Albert, SK]

Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the hon. member for sharing his time. It should be noted that all speakers from the Alliance party will be sharing their time from now on.

It was interesting to hear my colleague talk about being accountable. He lived in a small town that took five minutes to walk across. I lived in a town so small that if I looked out one window of the house I was on the east side of town and if I looked out the other window I was on the west side of town. People were really accountable there.

We are in the opening days of the 21st century. This is a century which has been characterized as the information age, yet we are in the House talking about how to get information out of the government.

People would think that rather than being in the information age we were in the days prior to the invention of the printing press by Gutenberg, for all the response we see to access to information requests and audits which are meant to be released as a matter of policy.

To quote from the 1998-99 annual report of the information commissioner:

As early as 1986, the Justice Committee reviewed the operation of the access law and unanimously recommended wholesale changes to strengthen it and keep it current with technological changes. No government since has had the motivation to implement the suggested changes and address, through law, the persistence of a culture of secrecy in the federal bureaucracy.

That was written in 1986 and quoted by the information commissioner in the 1998-99 report.

Nothing has changed. The official opposition currently has 29 requests for information filed with human resources development which are overdue. Of those 29 HRD requests, 8 are for departmental audits, which are supposed to be public information.

As I said earlier, this is the new millennium, the information age. The government's response times are prehistoric. They are stone age. There is no information forthcoming from the government.

Quoting from the same report of the information commissioner, this statement is still relevant today: “Frustration over weaknesses in the law has recently spilled over to members of parliament from all stripes in the House of Commons”.

That is why we are here today having this debate in the House. No one, not members of political parties, nor people in the news media, nor private citizens, nor researchers should have to request departmental audits under the Access to Information Act, and yet we find that it has become necessary to make such requests.

Even more unconscionable is the fact that the department is defying treasury board directives which require compliance within 30 days of acknowledging the request.

We only have to read the treasury board's words in a letter of decision dated May 26, 1999, which has been referred to before. Let us put it on the record again, so that anyone interested knows what was said:

To simplify the process for acquiring copies of reports, and to deliver on the government's commitment for more openness, the policy requires that departments make the final version of review reports, including internal audit and evaluation reports... accessible to the public, without requiring a formal access request.

Those are fine words, but actions speak louder than words, as the hon. member for Elk Island stated. If the government had lived up to its stated ideals, this supply day motion aimed at ordering the government to open up its information processes would not be necessary.

The public is probably at home asking themselves why there is a log-jam in responding to requests for information from the government. They are asking, are there legitimate reasons of national security? Or, are there problems with protecting vulnerable persons from exposure? Only if we subscribe to the view that it is in the national interest to protect ministers from public scrutiny, or if there are questions about the management of taxpayer dollars that might embarrass the government. All of the legitimate issues could be dealt with in an expeditious manner.

On March 20 the information commissioner testified before the Standing Committee on Human Resources Development. In his testimony he stated the reasons for this huge backlog at HRDC. I quote from his testimony:

With respect to the audit reports, there has been a slowdown, but the slowdown is government-wide, and the reason for that is that as a result of the HRDC experience...all audits now go through an additional process by Treasury Board and the Privy Council. What has happened is that Treasury Board and the Privy Council Office want to know what audits have been requested, whether they contain bad news, and what the official media line will be.

This is a regressive attitude for the government to take. It is not in the people's interest to have government manage bad news to avoid accounting for it. Ottawa is spin city for this Liberal administration when it comes to the release of information vital to holding it responsible for its actions. The current attitude has always been a major concern of the information commissioner.

In his recent testimony the information commissioner added “The communication concerns of the government are allowed to take precedence over the public's right to timely access to information”.

Despite ongoing concerns by the commissioner, it appears that HRDC had a fair track record when it came to the release of public information until recently. Now it is because of HRDC's intransigence that we are debating the issue.

Someone from another planet may not know why this is so, but in case there are other aliens who are listening, other than federal Liberals who have not figured it out, it can be summed up in three words: billion dollar boondoggle. That is the reason. That is a lot of taxpayer money and it is in question. Every time another audit or response to an ATI request is released there is more bad news for the government.

Being true to their roots, the Liberals are engaging in spin sessions to manage the message, when what they should be doing is reviewing the need for the programs and how to properly manage and account for them.

Information is crucial to accountability. If this government wanted to be truly accountable it would welcome scrutiny to improve its stewardship of the public credit card. And it is a credit card, because we do not have any money in the bank.

The information commissioner has rightly stated that the right of access is one of the cornerstones of our democratic process and one of the best tools available to ensure responsible government.

If the Liberals agree with that statement—and I bet they do privately, never mind what they do publicly—they should cast their ballot in favour of the supply day motion proposed by the Canadian Alliance in the name of the hon. member for Calgary—Nose Hill.

It should be stated again that this is no trivial matter which is under consideration today. We could consider the list of outstanding audits and ATIs filed by the official opposition to get an idea of it. Human resources development is late in replying to five departmental audits which should be public information according to treasury board guidelines. All five are 45 days overdue.

There are outstanding ATI requests with agriculture and agri-food, and Canada Customs and Revenue, which asked for a 30 day extension on March 9, I suppose for the purpose of figuring out how to respond to the bad news included within the response.

Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation requested an undefined extension due to third party consultations. We do not need much imagination to figure out who the third party was. Citizenship and immigration asked for a 90 day extension. Then there is fisheries and oceans. Some audits received 30 day extensions requested for others. Then there is the National Capital Commission.

When the members opposite talk about open and accountable government, they certainly are not looking at the facts, they are looking at the spin. That is not acceptable.

I am not sure which report of the auditor general it was in, but there was an interesting quote. I cannot remember how it went, but it concerned a Tammany Hall organizer from the United States, and we all know what that is about. He said something like “If you don't have to speak, grunt. If you don't have to grunt, nod. If you don't have to nod, wink”. I am not saying that is an exact quote, but that is the exact meaning. That has been the attitude of the government when it comes to releasing information. A wink and a nod is all we get, along with a few promises and the questions “Why don't you believe us? Why don't you like us?” The answer is obvious.

[Lou Sekora, Liberal, Port Moody—Coquitlam, BC]

Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for Mississauga South.

I am pleased to address the House today on this opposition motion. I begin by expressing my disappointment that members of the opposition do not understand and appreciate what the Government of Canada is doing for all Canadians. Maybe they do not want to understand for political reasons.

I doubt that all members have taken the time to read the document tabled in the House last Thursday by the President of the Treasury Board, along with 84 reports on plans and priorities for all federal departments and agencies. It is even more unlikely that they have taken the time to reflect on the actions and accomplishments of the government.

I do not intend to speak today about the excellent 2000-01 budget of the Minister of Finance; however, there are a few things I must mention. A few years ago, when the government gained power, there was a $43 billion deficit. The debt load was at an all-time high of some $490 billion. We also took over at a time when unemployment was very high, around 11.8%. It is now at a 30 year low of around 6.5%.

A lot of money in this budget was directed to the RCMP, which very badly needs it across Canada. It is a good budget. I talked to Deputy Commissioner Watt who said that the budget was great and much appreciated.

The number one issue was medical. Health and welfare needed more money. We gave $2.5 billion in the budget. Our health minister has met with all health ministers from across Canada to talk about more money and the need to modernize the system.

With respect to the health system, in my community, in British Columbia, there are hospitals every four or five miles which have a lot of modern, sophisticated equipment. I suggest that some of the equipment which is only being used four or five hours a day, between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m., could be used 16 hours a day, until midnight, for people who get off work in the evening. They would be able to get their medical attention, their scan or whatever, at that time. There has been a lot of progress since we took over as far as the government is concerned.

I know the Minister of Health wants to do the right thing with the provinces and give them more money for health. But we must work together. There was a very good comment by the health minister of British Columbia, Michael Farnworth. He mentioned the fact that it is going to take time and that it cannot be done in a day. He said that we must work together. I think that is a very fair comment. If everybody put their political stripes aside as far as the provinces are concerned and work with the health minister, I am sure we could accomplish a lot. I am sure there would be more money in the budget.

I want to bring to the House's attention a document from my colleague, the President of the Treasury Board, entitled “Results for Canadians: A Management Framework for the Government of Canada”. This document sets out a program of change providing long term direction for enhancing management of the government's affairs.

Since 1997 the government has been working hard to build a higher quality of life for all Canadians. We must constantly work toward improving our policies, programs and the framework governing the government's activities.

We have a solid foundation on which to build our efforts to modernize management within government. This foundation will also help all departments to focus on citizens, to draw upon values, to build on results and to spend responsibly.

Canadians know and appreciate that their government is operating from sound values, is results oriented and that it is continuing its sound approach to spending. There is a philosophy that goes along with the management framework for the Government of Canada. It is an operating philosophy that requires effort and control but a control that is achieved through instruments that encourage initiative and creativity by the departments.

Few people are aware that the Treasury Board Secretariat has been working with the departments and agencies since last summer to complete its review of the policy on transfer payments and to strengthen the internal audit function.

The purpose of an internal audit function is, among other things, to help identify shortcomings, to learn from those shortcomings and to make the necessary changes. One of the priorities of the Government of Canada is to regularly review its spending to ensure the responsible use of taxpayer's money in terms of results and values. One thing is certain with this framework and this philosophy. Canadians can continue to enjoy one of the best standards of living in the world.

The government has introduced the millennium fund. I can tell the House that in my community many applications have been filed and fulfilled. Those applications are very helpful to our community in building our communities, by bringing people together and by employing people.

Heritage Square submitted an application under the millennium fund for $84,000. It is outside my riding, however, I was mayor there for many years. The Reform member whose riding this is in refused to endorse the application so I endorsed it.

There was another application submitted for $348,000. This was also in a Reform riding. I approved it and they received the grant. This project looks after 1,800 kids. It is in a great area in Mallardville where all the residents get together with people from other communities. This facility looks after the community. When I was the mayor we spent $5 million in enlarging it and even now it is much too small. Every room is filled and they are looking for more space. These are things that are happening. These are things that our government is doing. I am sorry I referred to the party across from us as Reform because it has been changed to Alliance. They had a CCRAP Party and a few other things, so really we cannot tell what it really is.

Our public works minister put a vote to the House related to all municipalities getting grants in lieu of taxes for government buildings. Guess what? The Reform Party voted against it. It voted against the municipalities receiving grants for the communities. I am just wondering what side of the fence Reformers are really on. Do they support the municipalities that they represent? Do they really support the ridings that they represent, or do they really represent themselves and nobody else?

I have been a politician for going on 28 years. I was in municipal politics for 25 years. I am appalled at some of the comments that I have heard. When I came to Ottawa, some of the things I saw were frightening. I wish that every mayor and every council member in Canada would tune in and listen to the dismal performance of the Reform Party as far as the—

[Ken Epp, Reform, Elk Island, AB]

Mr. Speaker, I rise on a point of order. The Speaker of the House ruled just a little over a week ago that the name of our party is now Canadian Alliance. When people were misusing it, that ruling was reaffirmed and requested. Here we have a member who somehow does not have the ability to even learn two words. I would like to have him repeat three times after me: Canadian Alliance, Canadian Alliance, Canadian Alliance.

[The Deputy Speaker]

All hon. members try to get it right and I know the hon. member for Port Moody—Coquitlam—Port Coquitlam will make every effort to get the name of the Canadian Alliance Party correct.

[Lou Sekora, Liberal, Port Moody—Coquitlam, BC]

Mr. Speaker, it looks at this particular time that its name is being challenged in court. I do not know what its name will be when it goes to the Supreme Court of Canada. The leader of the Reform Party lived at Stornoway for many years. He said he would never live there and that he would open up a bingo hall in there. It was to become a bingo hall. I wonder how many times a week the party plays bingo in there. Another time—