Madam Speaker, for the folks back home I want to make sure they clearly understand what we are talking about. We are talking about human resources development and the massive boondoggle that the whole department is.
All the opposition parties have requested an independent inquiry into the ongoings at HRDC. I would like to add that the first committee I sat on when I was elected to the House of Commons barely three years ago was human resources development. Oftentimes I sat there with my jaw to the floor when I recognized exactly where taxpayers' funds were going in that $57 billion monster. I came to this job thinking there were problems in government, but when I sat on the HRDC committee I got a bigger shock than I was expecting.
There have been 20 different investigations with regard to what has been going on with HRDC. The worst part of it is that it is thickest among the benches of the cabinet ministers. There are four investigations in the Prime Minister's riding alone.
There is a system right now whereby things are being rubber stamped for the Prime Minister and other cabinet ministers' ridings or in ridings where the Liberals think they have the possibility of losing a seat. Right before elections and during elections they are pumping untold sums of money into those ridings so they can salvage them. They are doing it with taxpayer dollars. They are trying to buy votes. It is the most blatant abuse we could possibly imagine.
All of the opposition parties have been calling for an investigation into this blatant vote buying by the Liberals with taxpayer dollars. They should be ashamed of themselves.
The Canadian Alliance put out a dissenting opinion with regard to HRDC and the grants and contributions on Thursday, June 1. It was pointed out that there has been a lack of transparency with regard to the HRDC fiasco and the Liberal boondoggle and waste. There has been insistence that there be an audit and that it be made public.
The minister and her officials wanted to wait. They said that the audit would be made public. That is what they told us. That is what the minister said. She said that it would be a public audit and that everyone would have a look at it. However, when the audit was done did they make it public? Did the minister make it public even though that is what she promised to do? No. She broke her promise.
Instead, the minister waited until an access for information request had to pry it from her fingers. That is exactly what the minister did. She was trying to cover up the audit, even though she said that it would be a public audit.
It gets worse. An opposition MP finally received a copy of the audit dated October 5, 1999. When he got a copy of the audit he was asked to destroy it. Can we believe it? He was asked to destroy a copy of the audit and to accept a copy that was dated later in January 2000.
Let me trace the chain of events one more time. The minister said the audit would be made public, but when the audit was finally done she and her officials sat on it. Only because of access to information was that audit finally released. When the audit was finally released, the opposition members who got copies of it through access to information were told that they should destroy them and not use them. They were asked if they would be willing to accept one that was done later. If that is not a blatant cover-up, I do not know what is. That is what the Liberals are up to.
It goes on. I wish the story ended there but it does not. When members of parliament asked for details of HRDC grants by riding we were told they did not exist. The minister stood in her place in the House and said day after day that we as members of parliament could not get riding by riding breakdowns with regard to HRDC.
We were asking simple questions in the House with regard to what was happening in our individual ridings. We were told that we would have to go through access to information. That was it, that was the way we had to go.
The minister well knows that many times with access to information it means that money out of our budgets has to be spent, just because we were asking for a riding by riding analysis which the minister refused to provide even though she could. Or, we were told to put something on the 45 day order paper process rather than receive information directly from the minister. That is type of stuff we have been putting up with.
There has been a very clear cover-up of evidence of mismanagement with regard to HRDC, but there is more yet. It goes on. An employee of HRDC in New Brunswick received a phone call from Ottawa and was told that if there was anything missing in the HRDC files she was to review them, fill them out and backdate them.
The minister knew that there were problems with the files. She was denying it, standing day after day in the House of Commons and saying that there were no problems. However, she had the gumption, the public relations savvy, to phone the offices across the country, namely one in New Brunswick. She knew there were things missing from the files. We were asking questions about it. They knew there were things missing from the files. What did they do? They looked to cover it up. Once again it was another case of cover-up.
These employees were ordered to review them, fill them out and backdate the files. In a sense they were told to misrepresent and go ahead and alter the documents so that the real public record would not be known. That is what the Liberals were up to.
It goes on beyond that because there was a very blatant contradiction. The minister stood in the House of Commons on December 16 and said “No moneys flowed until the appropriate approvals were in place”.
It sounds so noble for the minister to say that no moneys flowed until the appropriate approvals were in place. How does that statement fit with the statement “there was anything missing in these files, review them, fill them out and backdate them?” That clearly indicates a contradiction.
The minister and her officials knew that there were things missing. They knew that those forms were not filled out. They knew that indeed those things would be backdated and that they were ordering their employees to do so. However the minister had the gall to stand in the House and say that no moneys flowed until the appropriate approvals were in place. How could the appropriate approvals be in place when she was ordering her officials to backdate the files, fill them out and review them? That is a pretty obvious abuse. I would say that is a pretty clear contradiction.
If we have a contradiction between what the minister is saying and what her employees are being ordered to do, it means that one person is telling the truth and the other person is telling something else. That is exactly what that means. It is something other than the truth.
I would side with the employee rather than with the minister in this case. We have $22 billion spent as grants and contributions in HRDC, a disingenuous communication strategy on the part of the government, and an absolute absence of controls and documentation. This reminds me of what happened with regard to APEC. We heard a member over there ballyhoo much about that, but he knows all too well there was a cover-up in that regard. He paid a price. He lost his job for that. He is no longer a cabinet minister.
It was not only APEC. It was also Somalia. The government did a cover-up with that when it got a little too close. That is exactly what it is doing with this. It knows it has problems and it does not want to admit that it is misusing taxpayer funds to buy votes with HRDC money.