Obfuscation is the word, with the assistance of the member for Palliser.
It is worrisome to Canadians. There is a renewed cry across the land for a better accounting system, one that is more understandable and more up to date and modern, yet 13 years after the subject was first introduced we still have to put forward private members' bills to encourage the government to introduce these measures.
Our reading of this issue, and I think I speak on behalf of most Canadians, is that even though the government's financial statements are now being prepared under accrual accounting practices, government estimates are not being prepared in the same manner. There is a contradiction here. There is a yardstick by which spending practices and perhaps spending outcomes are estimated and these differ from the yardstick used to measure the spending that took place. Surely this is contradictory. Not being a CA, I think that is a pretty simple way of rendering it down to an understandable and capsulized sort of statement.
There are two different yardsticks and all the bill seeks to do is coerce the government into implementing a strategy, which it agrees is the right thing to do, but to do it with some haste, energy and enthusiasm. Frankly, I think that the ruling party and the government actually could look pretty good in the public's eyes were they to do this.
Under the previous regime, prior to introducing the idea of the financial information strategy, the purchase of capital assets was deemed to be an expenditure in the fiscal year in which they were acquired. That is pretty basic and we can follow that, but under the new rules the asset is depreciated over its useful life. Let us say that the capital asset has a useful life of 10 years. In the year the asset is acquired, only one-tenth of the total value can be recognized as a government cost for that year.
As members can see, one cannot be budgeting one way and reporting actual expenses another way. That is why I think the Standing Committee on Public Accounts would welcome this motion, because it is the Standing Committee on Public Accounts that has been pushing for a modernized, revised way of doing our accounting practices.
I would point out that were that to happen we would be falling in line with the way the whole private sector works. Why should the government be doing its books in a way that is different from that of the private sector business community? Businesses, through pressure from their shareholders, have implemented a more understandable and common sense approach to their accounting practices. Why then should the government cling to what is viewed as an outdated practice? It is an incomplete way of viewing our national assets if we do not realize the whole depreciation factor.
This is why this is an important issue. I think it speaks to a larger issue of some ulterior motive, that is, that the government does not really want to complete the implementation of these practices because under the current regime it is easier to be secretive and less than forthright, even though on paper, if one can plow through reams of paper currently produced in the public accounting system, it is not as understandable as it could be. Again I raise the point that it is an issue of natural justice. People deserve to know. As well, it is one of the commonly made points in the literacy community that we are all trying to simplify our language so that it is more comprehensible.
I raised one of the issues that is drawing the scrutiny of the public to public spending in a way that it never has in recent memory: the issue of the technology partnership loans. Were this new accounting practice put in place fully, and if we had the new government operations and estimates standing committee in place, the merit of those planned expenditures would be tested against a whole different yardstick. In other words, much as most provincial governments do, any kind of major program spending would have to meet the tests under this new set of accrual accounting practices. We would want to know the predictable outcomes, or at least the goals and objectives, and by what yardstick those goals and objectives shall be measured as to whether they are met or not.
Under such a system or regime of accounting, I do not believe that the technology partnership loans would ever have gotten off the ground. This was program spending that was introduced, we argue, on a political whim more than on any kind of an economic rationale, to give money to corporations that do not need it in exchange for large contributions to the ruling party.
I am not overstating things when I suggest that, because why else would the government give $33 million to IBM to develop a technology research program? That is not a struggling, upstart young company and neither are Bombardier, Pratt & Whitney, Spar Aerospace or SNC-Lavalin. These companies did not need that investment, yet they dutifully kicked back large amounts of money to the Liberal Party to thank it for that investment.
If we had put in place the new government operations and estimates standing committee, whereby we could have reviewed the spending before it happened under a new accounting regime that measured outcomes in the same way we measure expenditures after the fact, the whistle would have been blown earlier on and we could have saved a lot of grief.
It is with regret that I note we have only 10 minutes to speak to this important subject. If the hon. member moves that the motion should be deemed votable, he would certainly have the support of the NDP caucus.