Mr. Speaker, I was listening to the speech by the Parliamentary Secretary to the President of the Treasury Board. He was basically reiterating what the president had already told us about the improvements they are going to be implementing. I have two questions.
The first is what assurance do we have that treasury board is going to police these new rules to see that they are implemented? We all know about the billion dollar boondoggle at the HRDC camp. It was because the rules were there but ignored that all this happened. It is fine to introduce new rules, but if they are just rules on paper and nobody says they must be followed, then what is the point?
The second question I have deals with grants, not contributions. Treasury board has a rule that when it hands out money in a grant, the person receives it but it will never audit the recipient to find out if it was spent in accordance with the grant.
Millions and billions of dollars in grants are handed out every year. They are sometimes for old age security which is a grant. We do not want to worry about auditing that. They get it and they spend it the way they want. All kinds of grants are given out, such as $145 million to the millennium fund to celebrate the millennium using Canadian taxpayers' dollars virtually all of which was a waste.
However, treasury board does not even know after it wrote the cheque whether the money was spent in accordance with what the applicants said they were going to do with the money. Treasury board says it does not want to audit after the fact to find out if they actually spent the money or put it in their pockets.
Those are two simple questions to ensure that Canadians can expect value for their money because quite often that is not happening.