Mr. Speaker, I want to ask the member for South Shore a question.
I was talking to a member of the board of the directors of a publicly created company the other day. He was telling me that when the company has a capital cost project of any consequence at all it has a standard cost overrun procedure, an accountability automatically built in. He said that if a project estimate goes over 5% the officials and engineers or whoever is involved with the account must come back, report to the board, and explain why it is over 5%. If it goes to 10% or looks like it is going to be a 10% cost overrun the project must stop. That is a publicly traded company in the private sector.
Does the member think the same standard should be applied to the government? We know that when this bill was sold to Parliament and Parliament voted for it we were told that it would cost a net of $2 million a year. Now the Auditor General says it will be $1 billion in the end. This is a cost overrun of unbelievable precedent setting proportion. Does the hon. member think the government should be held accountable and should there be some kind of accountability for the government the same as there is in the private sector?