Madam Speaker, I am pleased to participate in the debate. Let me also thank the constituents of St. Albert for returning me as their member of parliament. They decided not to choose John Williams from the NDP, who was also a candidate in my riding, as the candidate, but they got the other John Williams. It led to an interesting little election.
I have to compliment and thank the people who worked so hard on my election. I think of Janet Bailey, my campaign chairman, Charlie Schroeder, who was my assistant campaign chairman, and Marlene and Tom Patterson who ran my sub-office in the city of Spruce Grove.
Today, I want to focus on waste, mismanagement, incompetence and everything else that we find in government. Just before the election the auditor general tabled a report. He tabled another report this week. I will quote from the auditor general's report because these points should be on the record. Regarding the stewardship of public funds he said that they deserve increased attention. I have, as the President of the Treasury Board knows, been trying to elevate the awareness of these things to challenging the spending of this government in parliament.
I refer to pages 7 and 8 of the forward of the report of the auditor general. In that he said:
But shortcomings of the sort revealed at HRDC—vague and inconsistently applied eligibility criteria, breaches of authority, absence of appropriate control and accountability framework—are by no means exclusive to one program or one department. We observed shortcomings of a similar nature (though of a lesser magnitude) in our 1996 audit of the Canada Infrastructure Works program, our 1997 audit of The Atlantic Groundfish Strategy and our 1998 audit of grant and contributions programs at Industry Canada and the Department of Heritage.
Talking about Canadians, he went on to say:
Frankly, I share their frustration. It is discouraging to witness new incidents of waste and mismanagement crop up hydra-like after older ones have been discovered and dispatched.
In my 10 years as Auditor General, I have seen significant improvements...often under the pressure of fiscal constraints. But progress has been too slow—
It has been far too slow and seems to go on and on.
As we all know, the auditor general is retiring on March 31. He has been tabling reports for 10 years with little or no sign that the government wants to take these things seriously. For example, we had the billion dollar boondoggle at HRDC. At Heritage Canada, 19% of the files have not been subject to due diligence. A further 30% of files were rated as borderline acceptable. That is in paragraph 33.283 in chapter 33 of his report.
It just seems that the government does not care until such time as somebody points these things out and really slaps the government on the side of the head to get it to do something.
Page 3411 of his report deals with HRDC and the employment insurance fraud which has been going on for many years. For many years HRDC and CCRA officials have been aware of suspected fraudulent practices related to the false record of employment forms and no action has been taken. How can this be?
Think of social insurance numbers which were introduced back in the early sixties.