Thank you for your patience, Mr. Speaker. I will go directly to the quotations of relevance. The Auditor General said, “Even though the department has many explanations for this ballooning of costs”--this is the underlying part--“it never shared any of them with Parliament”. The Auditor General went on to say, “What is really inexcusable is that Parliament was in the dark”.
In botanical bureaucratic terms, this means that it was like mushrooms on a manure pile, the strategy in short being that it grows until somebody notices the smell.
Tomorrow the House will be asked to approve more than $62 million in additional funds for the gun registry, a program that is already estimated to be in the range of $1 billion. The government has failed to justify in any way this raid on the pockets of the taxpayers of Canada. The minister has yet to come before the House to justify this additional spending.
An emergency debate, I suggest to the Chair, is the only vehicle left for the House of Commons to hear an explanation on this issue. The minister has not made a ministerial statement. The time for committee examination and supplementary estimates is over. They have been returned to the floor of the House. The government has no initiatives or mechanisms in the House to shine light on this $1 billion mismanagement of public funds.
In conclusion, Mr. Speaker, I ask that you order this debate to take place so the House can be fully informed of the situation through a full debate before we pour millions more into this $1 billion cesspool. Canadians need to know why Parliament was kept in the dark and where the money is going. The Chair obviously knows the criteria for this type of debate. To do anything less, I would suggest, is to ratify the grossly improper actions of the Department of Justice.