Madam Speaker, money is always relevant and the waste and mismanagement of it is always relevant.
Let us talk about the waste and mismanagement of money that the government outlined in the throne speech, and how it is going to spend it. The problem is that it spends it with abandon, carelessly, without proper control and proper diligence. That is why I am talking about waste and mismanagement in the context of the throne speech. It is relevant and always will be.
I was talking about social insurance numbers which were introduced in the early sixties back in the days before we had sophisticated computers. We now have sophisticated programs to send cheques out to everybody.
However, back in those days an income tax number, social insurance number, was basically a file at Revenue Canada. If anyone had a file with Revenue Canada it basically meant he or she had to pay money. Now if we have file with Revenue Canada, it usually means a cheque in the mail. We talked about it this week. The Minister of Finance has sent out $125 to all people who do not qualify for the heating oil rebate, including my own son. Guess who pays the utility bill in my home? It is not him.
Concerning the social insurance numbers, one person got 76 social insurance numbers and was getting 76 child tax benefit cheques in the mail every month. The government never reviewed the management of social insurance numbers for 30 years, until the auditor general pointed it out. Then it decided that maybe it should do something about it. He does say in the report that the government is doing something, but only after 30 years.
We have treasury board which is not exempt. Let me quote what he says about the treasury board. He said:
—Treasury Board Secretariat guidelines do stress the importance of balanced reporting and the need to report lessons learned...little reference in the reports to the fairness and reliability of the performance information they contain. Very few reports mention the possibility that there may be shortcomings or problems in the data.
I think he is referring to what we call the performance reports.
Treasury board writes all these rules but it does not police them. It sends them out to the deputy ministers and departments who just say “Well, that's okay”. They do what they want because treasury board does not hold them accountable. Until such time as treasury board starts policing its own rules for departments, we will to continue to find taxpayers' money being wasted every time we turn around.
Money was wasted deliberately by the Minister of Finance. He sent out $1.3 billion of cheques out in the mail which were approved, by the way, under special warrant because parliament was not sitting. I hope the President of the Treasury Board is going to be making a report to us soon because without parliament's approval the government should not be spending any money unless it is urgent. I am not exactly sure that my son really needed that $125 right away. Some may, but there are hundreds of thousands of people who live in apartments.
Yesterday an MP told me that one of his constituents who chops his own wood got a cheque for about $600. That was for he and his family members. It did not cost him a nickel for his heating, but he got a cheque in the mail. We find these programs, at an election time, very susceptible. This should have been a better defined program. It should have been targeted to the people who really need it. We acknowledge that there are people who need it. There are people who have difficulty paying these utility bills as the rates go right through the roof because the provincial and federal governments have not properly managed the production of energy for the country.
Now the consumer has to pay for government's mistakes. The government sends out cheques but to the wrong people, and others still have a hard time. We would hope that the government would listen to Canadians and ensure that their money is well spent.
The other day I pointed out the HRDC billion dollar boondoggle. Now we have the Minister of Health and his problems with the Fontaine native health treatment centre in Manitoba. After years of knowing that there were problems, he has finally decided to have a forensic audit after $30 million went down the drain. There were cruises in the Caribbean and deputy ministers going to Hawaii courtesy of the taxpayer. Only after it became a public issue did the government say that it got caught and that it better do something about it. That is no way to run a household. It certainly is no way to run a business and by far no way to run a country.
I would hope that since we are into a new parliament and we now have a throne speech that the government will take its responsibilities seriously and ensure that if it is going to spend taxpayers' money, that it spends it wisely and well. Yesterday, the Minister of Justice yesterday said that public business is a public trust. I would hope the government will live up to that, starting today.