Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for his comments and question. I have been following the debate all day, and heard him ask the question previously.
There are two things in play here. One would be, as in the case he described, that a very specific incident should be dealt with and that one was. Something was seriously wrong, was proved to be criminally wrong and the person was handed over to law enforcement authorities and was appropriately prosecuted. Each time such a thing occurs members of parliament should do their best to see that convictions are achieved in those cases.
With all due respect, as members of parliament we should constantly think about the system. There are two systems here. One is the system of operations or the bureaucracy of the federal government. The other is the operation of parliament. Then there are the links between the two. This is a good example of parliament exercising the sort of overview functions that it should.
The striking thing in recent years has been that the system, and I would say both sides of it, the House of Commons side and the bureaucracy side, has been working well.
One of my concerns in recent parliaments has been the fact that there have been four parties in opposition. With due respect that weakens the key function of government which is the official opposition. In the last couple of years it has been particularly weak because it seems to me for various reasons each of the parties opposite has been divided within themselves. The opposition function has been weakened in parliament. As a result, the system itself is very important.
A matter of great debate a few years ago involved HRDC. The striking thing was that it was discovered by an internal auditor, not by the official opposition. A new minister came in and publicly tabled a report recounting serious problems in HRDC. The minister took the full heat in the House of Commons, and rightfully so, about those matters. The incident was sorted out administratively and some charges were laid by the RCMP. It is important to realize that this matter was not raised by the opposition but by an internal audit.
When problems float to the top of a huge system, such as the one we are administering, then the system is in good shape. I do not mean it is perfect and we should have debates like this to make it stronger. It means that the system itself is working.
What I was trying to say in my remarks was that our governments have done their best to strengthen that internal process which ideally identifies problems such as the one that the member mentioned.