Mr. Speaker, it is my honour to rise in the House today to speak about my favourite subject: the accountability of parliament to Canadian taxpayers on how their money is spent.
My colleague from St. Albert has brought forward an important motion. It is worthy of the support of all members of the House. The report is one that was put together by a committee which was dominated by the Liberal Party as all committees are. The final committee report was tabled a couple of years ago and the motion calls for the government to implement that report.
Our democratic system has a circle of accountability and it occurs over and over again except when it comes to the expenditure of public money. Every citizen is responsible to obey the law put together and passed by parliament.
On the other hand, in the circle of responsibility parliament is accountable to the citizens. We in parliament must ensure that the laws we pass have the support of the citizens. There is a gigantic circle of accountability where we are accountable to them and they are accountable to us.
That is a good principle because with a circle of accountability we can prevent the tyranny of any individual with excessive power or a powerful majority in the House. Eventually the majority has to be accounted for.
My favourite example about the circle of accountability happened on October 25, 1993, when a government with a majority got the ultimate message of accountability. It was reduced from a majority government to two members. That was done by the people and rightly so.
The people cast their judgment, said the Liberal and the Conservative governments of the past had driven them into ever increasing debt and held them accountable. The people did not like the taxation policies, the management and arrogant style of those governments. The Progressive Conservative Party moved from being the majority to holding its caucus meetings in phone booths.
By voting for the motion we have an opportunity to improve the circle of accountability with respect to money. It is true that members of the public elect their parliamentarians. I have heard many times that Canadian taxpayers are discontented with the fact that there seems to be no accountability.
This occurs when government waste comes out. My colleague from St. Albert is now famous for his waste reports where he highlights silly spending by the Government of Canada. It is maddening to taxpayers when these things are made public.
Government members can say that it does not really matter because it is only $50,000 or $60,000. I hope that I never stop thinking of $50,000 or $60,000 as an awful lot of money. We should think about students who can hardly make ends meet and who must pay income tax on their meagre earnings. It is their money that is being wasted. We should think of the many families having trouble making ends meet and who cannot pay their bills adequately to provide for their families the way they would like to do.
Some are being taxed at $100 or $200 a month, some at $1,500 a month and some higher than that. Usually if people are paying more than $1,500 a month in taxes probably, they have an adequate income to pay most of their bills.
Thousands of Canadians who are in low income brackets are still being forced to pay $100, or $200 or $300 a month of income tax. When they hear about how that money is being wasted, my choice would be to let them keep their money and stop the government waste.
The motion we have before us asks the government to accept and to implement the report that was put out by this subcommittee, entitled “The Business of Supply: Completing the Circle of Control”. To give a very quick summary, it proposes to create yet another committee of parliament.
Before everyone reacts and says that the House of Commons has enough committees and does not need another one, I would like to venture a guess that if we passed this motion and if such a committee were formed, we would find out very quickly that it would be deemed to be the most important committee of parliament. I am a member of the finance committee. I almost hesitate to say this, but I think it would be considered, if not greater than, at least equal in importance to the finance committee because it would have so much influence in controlling and exposing the expenditures of government.
The number of recommendations in the report are quite large and I will comment on a few of them. This is a private member's motion and it is votable. I urge all members who stand up to vote on this not to follow the instructions from their party bosses because by tradition this House has become a House of free votes. In other words, each member uses his or her own intellect instead of going on in blind obedience when being told how to vote. I would encourage each member, especially those Liberals who have a lot of control here because of their numbers, to vote in favour of this important bill to establish this committee and put the financial accounting of our country back on a sound basis.
I remember when we first came here we tried to do this in a rather innocuous way. The estimates were tabled in the House and then we would get to vote on them. We had those all night sessions, usually late in June, when we would start voting at 10 o'clock. We would vote and we would vote from 10 o'clock until 2 o'clock or 3 o'clock in the morning. By the time we would sat down, we had voted in expenditures of maybe $25 billion or $30 billion.
I made a point the other day in the finance committee that the government spends approximately $6,000 per second, every second of every day, every day of every year. That is 86,400 seconds in a day and we spend $6,000 every second. Every snap of my finger right now is another $6,000 down the tubes. It is about time that we, as parliamentarians, demonstrate to Canadians that we are spending that money wisely and not frittering it away.
The set up of that committee would give it great powers. It would have the power to call in front of it, not only members of the committees themselves but the chairmen of the different standing committees whose job it is to check the estimates for each department.
A great improvement in this system which is being proposed is that parliament would scrutinize all government expenditures not just the non-legislated ones. Right now we only get to vote on about one-third of the amount of money that is spent because the rest of it is called statutory spending and is in the statutes. However this committee would scrutinize that expenditure as well. It would bring into its sphere of influence and accountability issues like the HRDC spending.
Billions of dollars are spent on pensions, on Canada pension, on the supplementals, on child tax credits and things like that. That does not go through HRDC. That is a tax credit, but there is another area where we have lost accountability and we need to bring it back.
I regret that my time is up because I pretty well only finished my introduction. If no one else stands again to rise, I could perhaps stand up again and use the next 10 minutes on someone else's behalf, by proxy if you permit, Mr. Speaker.