Mr. Speaker, I listened to the speaker from the NDP with interest. As usual, she is worth listening to because she speaks from the heart in a lot of cases. Her concern about health care, which she has expressed many times in the House as she always finds a way to talk about health in her speeches, was extremely appropriate at this time.
I will glance over the fact that we need to have an accountable system and stay strictly to the point of the waste that has been identified by the Auditor General, including the billion dollar fiasco in the gun registry, and the Auditor General's question about the need to have a $40 billion surplus in the EI fund.
From my own point of view, if we had known from the beginning that this was happening we could have prevented it. The biggest point the Auditor General made was that Parliament was kept in the dark while this was being done. If Parliament had known what was going on, as it should have if a proper accounting system had been in place, this waste would not have occurred. If the minister and his people could defend their estimates and their estimates could be scrutinized, this waste would not have occurred.
With the billion dollars wasted on the gun registry and the built up EI surplus for no apparent reason other than to pad government coffers, does the member not think this funding could be more properly targeted if we knew what was going on within the government?