Mr. Speaker, let me put on the record that we thank God for the Auditor General of Canada. She is the great, impartial, credible person who has access to the records of the Government of Canada. When she tables her report the country sits up and takes notice, and rightly so because her report points out the deficiencies, maladministration, ineffectiveness, waste, mismanagement, and so on that we find in the files of the Government of Canada.
Left to its own devices the government would take every dollar that Canadians had, spend it on frivolous and inefficient programming, and Canada would be going down the drain. So thank God for the Auditor General, who goes in there, diligently looks at the files and says that we must tell Parliament what is going on.
The Auditor General has said many things over the years. On accountability, she said:
Parliament must be in control when it comes to approving expenditures and scrutinizing results. When Parliament is out of the loop, taxpayers lose their say in how the government spends their tax dollars.
Our Auditor General speaks well. She speaks loudly and wisely. She keeps Parliament informed. Parliament's job is to keep the government on its toes and for the government to answer questions in the House about how Canadian taxpayers' money is being spent. Unfortunately, we find out far too often it is not being spent well.
If we go back two or three years, there was a thing called the HRDC billion dollar boondoggle, where we were writing cheques when we did not even have an application on file. We did not have any idea why we were spending the money, we would just write the cheque because somebody thought it was a good idea. Every rule in the book was being broken. Nobody was paying attention to the rules. Nobody was worrying about the Canadian taxpayer and value for money. The Auditor General pointed it all out to us and it became a major scandal, and rightly so.
What happened after it became a major scandal? The government said, “Oops, we had better start following our own rules written by the President of the Treasury Board”. She showed up here this morning and said that when the Auditor General speaks, we listen. I wish that were true.
The Auditor General has been talking for years about the $40 billion, and growing, surplus in the employment insurance fund.The Minister of Finance stood in the House last week and told us that he would be reducing EI premiums. How wonderful he is, he is going to let Canadians keep their own money. He only dropped the premium 5%, from $2.10 down to $1.98. It is under two bucks.
He says this is good news, but it was only a 5% decrease. Guess what? It does not take effect until January 1, 2004. He will be keeping the old cash machine rolling the cash in for another 11 months before he has the generosity to let Canadians keep their own money. Even though the Auditor General has been pointing out for years that this should not be a cash cow, that this is supposed to be a self-financing program and nothing else, the government has used it to self-finance the government. So thank God for the Auditor General, who puts the pressure on the government and it must pay attention.
We have talked a lot about the gun registry, another billion dollar boondoggle. This was going to be a $2 million program by the then minister of justice. He was so proud of this because he was going to keep it as his own little program, run by his own little department, the Department of Justice. The Department of Justice has about 2,000 or 3,000 lawyers who write legal reports and briefs. They do legal opinions and write legislation. But they have never ran a program in 100 years.
The minister of justice of the day, and we know who I mean, thought that this would be his great kickstart into the Prime Minister's office. But like everything else he touched, it went sour on him.
The Auditor General did a complete report which she tabled last December. Here are some of the headlines in her report:
Current ownership and registration requirements are more rigorous.Single point accountability for the Program was not implemented.Program cost estimates have risen from $119 million to over $1 billion.Contrary to the original announcement, fees will not cover expenditures.From the start insufficient financial information was provided to Parliament.Supplementary estimates were inappropriately used.Accountability for all Program costs was not maintained.The financial information provided does not fairly present all costs.In 1996 the Department recognized that funding assumptions were unrealistic.In May 1998, program costs were estimated to be $544 million.By February 2000, program cost estimates had increased to $764 million.By May 2000, the Program cost estimates rose to more than $1 billion.In February 2001, a new plan to restructure the Program was approved.The program became excessively regulatory.Restructuring involves replacing an expensive, three-year-old computer system.
The government was going to trash the computer system because it did not work. That is hundreds of millions of dollars down the drain.
That is what our Auditor General told Parliament. She added that there were deficiencies in the management of revenues and refunds. The whole thing was just a dog's breakfast. We are glad we have the Auditor General to point that stuff out to us because the government is incompetent, plain and simple.
What did the Auditor General say about the gun registry? She said in her news release:
The issue here is not gun control. And it's not even astronomical cost overruns, although those are serious. What's really inexcusable is that Parliament was in the dark.
We can thank God for the Auditor General that she can shed some light on these issues. We can take these issues up on behalf of all the taxpayers in this country and ask about the waste, mismanagement, incompetence and so on that goes on each and every day.
Then, of course, last year there was the Groupaction scandal. The Auditor General said that senior public servants broke just about every rule in the book. This is reminiscent of the HRDC billion dollar boondoggle. She said:
I have referred this matter to the RCMP and I am undertaking a government-wide value-for-money audit of advertising and sponsorship programs of the Government of Canada.
We have Groupaction that comes to light and $40 million goes straight down the drain. We dealt with that at the public accounts committee. We would have had a report in the House if it had not been held up by some members of the committee, but I will not get into that. The point is we will table a report in this House that will tell us what went wrong. Maybe we do not have all the answers, but at least we have the report of the Auditor General telling us that every rule in the book was broken. How can we have faith in a government when the Auditor General tells us these types of things are going on?
Do members remember the heating fuel rebate? It was introduced two days before the election in 2000. We had a budget and the day after the budget we had an election. The budget was never implemented, but the Minister of Finance promised Canadians assistance to help them with the high cost of heating fuel because they could not afford the increasing prices throughout the winter. The Auditor General told us about this program later on. It was a fairly short lived program because heating fuel prices went up and then they came back down, and the program was finished and cancelled.
We in the Canadian Alliance have no problem with and in fact support the idea of helping those in need when they need help. The point was that the program cost $1.4 billion and the Auditor General told us that only $400 million went to people who, by the government's own definition, needed the subsidy. That was $1 billion wasted again. What is even worse is that 90,000 Canadians who needed the money did not get a dime, not one dime.
The government, the Liberal Party, went across the country, the Prime Minister, the Minister of Finance and everybody else went from coast to coast saying, “We are doing a wonderful thing for Canadians”. It was $1 billion down the drain.
The HRDC billion dollar boondoggle, the gun registry billion dollar boondoggle, the heating fuel rebate billion dollar boondoggle; three programs, $3 billion. Do we not realize there is a pattern of waste, incompetence and mismanagement? The attitude that it is okay, it is the taxpayers' money and they can afford it so do not worry about it cannot prevail. That is the point we must get across.
Taxpayers are beginning to realize that they are being taken in a scam by the government. The government had better pay attention because after the next election, the Liberals will be over here and we will be over there because the Canadian taxpayers think that enough is enough. That is why I say thank God for the Auditor General.
What does the Auditor General say on financial management? “Like other similar government-wide reforms, this initiative aimed at improving financial management and control has not received the commitment and leadership that it needs to succeed. For an organization that spends almost $180 billion a year, this is not acceptable. It is time for the government to get serious and get on with making the necessary improvements”. Here we go again. The government does not know how to manage taxpayers' money.
What does she say on lack of leadership? “Without better direction and clear expectations, these initiatives will flounder. Even the best intentioned department cannot make up for a lack of leadership from the centre”. She pointed a finger at the Prime Minister. It is time the Prime Minister and the whole front bench realized that they are the centre and if they cannot run the show, they should step aside and let somebody else do it.
Then there are the foundations. There is $7 billion of taxpayers' money parked in private bank accounts outside the control of Parliament, outside the control of the Auditor General, outside the control of anybody but a board of directors appointed by, of course, the Liberal government. The foundations can spend the money as and when they see fit.
The numbers were massaged so that when we thought the books were balanced, they took $7 billion that would have been reported as a surplus and put it in a bank account. Then if they ever wanted to have some deficit financing, they could spend the money without it even showing up on the books.
For example, $2.5 billion went into the Canadian scholarship fund in 1998 and it is still sitting there. We have paid to educate tens of thousands of Canadians, to help with their post-secondary education, to give them a start in life, to help them build this great and wonderful country we live in.
We authorized the funds. Where are they? Sitting in a bank account. The kids did not get the money. The taxpayers forked out the cash that is sitting in a bank account so that when the Minister of Finance thinks the time is right, when it is most advantageous to the party on that side of the House, he can say, “Open the floodgates and let it roll”, and nothing will show in the Public Accounts of Canada.
There is $7 billion parked there off balance sheet. We have heard about off balance sheet before. It seems to me it was tagged to a couple of names like Enron and WorldCom. We came down heavy on those companies and we should come down heavy on the government.
When we dealt with this at the public accounts committee last week, the government members just shrugged and said, “We can do what we want. We have an agreement. We have created the organization. It is perfectly legal”. We know it is perfectly legal but the point is all the people on the government backbenches hold their noses and vote for whatever the Minister of Finance wants and the taxpayer is left holding the bag, and the bill. Do not forget the bill.
The Auditor General also reported on health care. The Department of Health delivers health care to our native population. It is not the provinces that does that, but the provinces deliver health care to everyone else.
The Auditor General pointed out that one dentist caught on to the scam that the government does not check its bills. For one particular procedure, and I am not sure what it was, he charged the Government of Canada 40 times more than the allowed price by the insurance companies and the provinces. These things are all negotiated. We know how it is; a dental plan only pays so much and if the dentist charges more, he can go away.
We paid 40 times more than the going rate and no one asked, “Is this not a little pricey?” The government's attitude is, “We do not need to ask these questions, we just pay the bills. The taxpayer can afford it”. We need the Auditor General to point these things out.
The Auditor General also pointed out that one gentleman called an ambulance to go to the hospital, which is fine. If someone needs to go to the hospital, he or she can call an ambulance. That is what they are there for. He did it 150 times in a five month period. There are approximately 150 days in five months. If we do the math, he called an ambulance every day, which means he needed a ride to town. No one asked, “Is there something going on here? Is this guy really sick? Maybe not”. The government said, “Just pay the bill. Do not worry, the taxpayers can afford it”.
Then there are the serious cases. We dealt with this in the public accounts committee also because the Auditor General pointed it out. We pay for the prescriptions for our native population. We do not have any controls on the central nervous drugs, the ones people want to sell on the streets. We have controls for the rest of society because of the triplicate prescription concept. But no, we cannot do that for the native population because it would be against the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, human rights and privacy, the whole ball of wax. We cannot do it for them. They can go down the street to 10 different doctors, which some of them do.
We heard the story from Mrs. Stonechild from Saskatoon whose brother and son both overdosed on drugs, all paid for by the Government of Canada, all prescription drugs, within a three week period. The Department of Health said it was not its problem and there was nothing it could do. That is disgusting. It is absolutely shocking and shameful. We can do it for everybody else but not for the native population.
I could go on but I want to point out a couple of things. There are a couple of members on the other side who took the Auditor General to task and I say shame on them.
The member from Beauséjour—Petitcodiac said, “I hope before anybody gets too exercised about what the Auditor General might think, they look at the mistakes that her office made, including a $4 billion overpayment to the provinces”. The Auditor General does not pay anybody; we all know that. She is the auditor. She does not run the Government of Canada. She does not write the cheques for the Government of Canada. Shame on him for saying something like that.
The MP for Pickering—Ajax—Uxbridge questioned why the auditors general for years also missed the problems with the sponsorship program. What about the government? It runs the program. It broke every rule in the book. She only takes a look at a small sample and thank goodness somebody stumbled across the fact that these things were a mess.
Shame on those members for taking the Auditor General to task.
I finish as I began. Thank God for the Auditor General of Canada.