Madam Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for Calgary West.
It is a pleasure to rise to address this issue, calling for an independent inquiry into human resources development. It would be an understatement to say that the minister's handling of HRD has been a disaster. That does not come close to describing it.
After having heard the member for Fredericton speak, I am not surprised it has been the disaster it has been. I just heard him compliment a member from the Bloc, saying—and this would be a high Liberal compliment I guess—that he is very effective at getting things for his riding. Government is Santa Claus to the Liberals. It is this endless pit of money.
Is it any wonder that they have made this great contribution to driving our debt to its present height of $577 billion. It is not surprising at all.
I want to talk about what actually happened. The whole modus operandi of the member who just spoke, the minister and the Liberal government has been to cover up this issue, and then when they get exposed they downplay it.
Let me run through what has happened. We heard the minister in the House today trying to justify how it was that months after her own officials knew about the disaster at HRD she was merrily writing cheques to the tune of half a billion dollars on a program that was so fundamentally broken that the internal audit had shown that about a billion dollars had been issued without proper accounting, in some cases without records indicating what the money was to be used for and without grant applications. It was a nightmare.
Between the time when this was first exposed by the interim audit and officials in the government knew about it, and three months later when the minister acknowledged that she knew about it, and even after she knew about it, she continued to write cheques, even though there were no controls in place. The money poured out.
As we mentioned today in question period, the most money poured out in the month of November, the month that she allegedly knew about this for the first time. There was $165 million which poured out in that month and there were no proper controls. It is unbelievable.
When we raised these things, of course the government said that it had been transparent. I want to hit that on the head right now. The truth is that the government had no intention of releasing anything until such time as the official opposition, the Canadian Alliance, at that time the Reform Party, submitted an access to information request on January 17. Lo and behold, on January 19 the government called a hasty news conference to say there were problems in human resources development. It said that there had been an audit and there were problems.
That is exactly what we asked for in our access request, a copy of any internal audits. Amazingly, this turned up two days later. The government was trying to do damage control.
The minister said she had been transparent all along. Why was it that she got the full briefing on November 17 but nothing was released until January 19 if she wanted to be completely transparent? Why did it take those two intervening months? I do not understand that if she was completely transparent. We have documents that show that the spin doctors in the minister's department were saying that nothing should be released until such time as someone thought to ask for the information through an access to information request.
When she says that she is fully transparent, that is only true in one sense. The sense is that we can see right through her when she says that.
The truth is the minister was not transparent. She is still not transparent. The member for Calgary—Nose Hill, the official opposition critic for human resources development, did an outstanding job of providing case after case after case to show that the minister is anything but transparent.
We are seeking all kinds of information that is completely relevant to this $1 billion mismanagement, this boondoggle, that the Liberals will not release. It was a misrepresentation both by the member for Fredericton and the minister when they said that all the access to information requests were being processed. Then they got up and read something from the privacy commissioner saying that everything has been done on time. That was before the audit was released.
Ever since then all of our access to information requests get submitted and it takes longer and longer to get information back. I am sure that the strategy is to put it off at least until the summer, to try to get to the summer so the Liberals can get this issue off the front burner and on to the back burner.
It is disingenuous, insincere talk that we get from the government about how transparent it is. The opposite is the case.
There are 20 police investigations. I heard the minister say that this was about $6,500. If that is not the most ridiculous laughable statement that I have heard in this place today, I do not know what is. The truth is that there are now 20 police investigations probing what has gone on in HRD. That tells us a little bit about how serious this situation is.
There are four investigations in the Prime Minister's riding alone. There are all kinds of accusations about money being used improperly and there are many questions about the Prime Minister's office skipping normal procedures to ensure that money went to people he favoured. It is unbelievable. The Liberals have somehow brushed this off: it is only $1 billion with which all this mismanagement is occurring so why be concerned?
Then the Liberals move into downplay mode. Now that the cover-up has been exposed, they want to downplay it. They say it is ancient history, that was before and they are looking to the future. In truth, if the government is to be the least bit responsible, people have to be held accountable for this type of incompetence on one hand and blatant political pork-barrelling on the other hand. If there is to be any sense of justice in this place, then people who have made major mistakes have an obligation to own up to them and to be punished for them.
In the private sector people do not escape these things. I would argue that in situations like this people would go to jail. And here we have that kind of unbelievable negligence with the public's tax dollars to the tune of $1 billion. It is unbelievable.
The time has long passed for the government to accept that there were major, major problems in this department, but it continues to stonewall. The Liberals want to look forward. The most interesting example of that was when the Prime Minister was in Germany the other day. He said that he wanted the upcoming election to be about ideologies. It was obvious by what was not said, that he did not want to talk about the record.
If the Liberals talk about the record, they will have to talk about probably one of the worst scandals in terms of government misspending that we have ever seen under their watch. There are 20 police investigations and $1 billion has been poured out the door plus another $500 million in the months since August and in some cases there is absolutely no accounting for it. This is unbelievable.
The Liberals do not want to talk about their record and who could blame them. We would be happy to take them on on the issue of ideology, but the trouble is they would have to find one. Their party does not seem to stand for anything except trying to get elected.
What we have seen in HRDC is a perfect example of the situation when we talk about the administration process. The transitional jobs fund is a clear attempt by the Liberals to lever themselves back into power by pouring money into certain key ridings hoping that the public will be bought off by political pork-barrelling. It is to the point where the HRD committee itself has recommended that the department be broken up without fully saying that it is the result of this boondoggle.
We must have an independent inquiry. What we have seen so far is stonewalling from the government. The Canadian public deserves some answers.