Mr. Speaker, I thank the hon. member for that intervention. I will agree that I find HRDC dysfunctional to the point of being out of control. It is simply too big.
I remember when the government pulled HRDC together into this super portfolio, under Lloyd Axworthy at the time. People wondered then if that amount of activity could be managed under one portfolio. The answer, now that we have the experience, is simply no, it cannot. It should be split up. It should be divided into manageable chunks and administered in a way that actually meets the needs of Canadians so that people can get some actual service.
In terms of the many grants I was speaking about, all of them were from Industry Canada. This is a program under Industry Canada, but there are many other grant programs which I presume have comparable records in terms of the ratio of money paid back.
The former Minister of Industry was known as a real master of these grants. He knew that he could tap into this fund without any question, without any real qualifications, without any yardstick to measure progress, as I said before. There were no outcomes required, whereas I would think that when we are giving money away we would like to be able to say “I'm going to lend you $1 million for this company if you create 20 jobs in the community”. There should be some kind of predictable outcome. Two years later we could go back to see if there were or were not 20 jobs created. That is the way in which we would be able to measure progress. There are none of those checks and balances in these programs.