Madam Speaker, I happened to be reading through the report of the Auditor General of Canada. It seems we might classify this as a report card on the fiscal responsibility of the government. I made some notes: a billion to two billion dollars shot on the gun registry; a billion dollars wasted on the HRDC boondoggle; and goodness know how many hundreds of million of dollars on the sponsorship program. Mr. Justice Gomery will get to the root of that and we will get a total picture eventually, if we do not get any more interference from the member opposite.
There are two things in the report. The gap between aboriginal children on the reserves and the rest of the population has widened. The indicators of drug abuse under the drug plans are serious. The problem is triple what it was in 2000. The government is spending more money, but the results are poorer.
The thing that really takes the cake is $46 billion put into a fictional account, the EI fund. I say fictional because it does not exist. The government has taken that money from overtaxed Canadians, from workers and their employers and I do not know, but perhaps it has blown on the gun registry or the HRDC boondoggle or some of these other events. It is not there. It shows up in papers as an account, but there is no money in it. If the country heads into a recession or a slowdown where the unemployment figures go up, the government does not have a fund to take care of that.
The report card by the Auditor General is not a very good picture. In grade school I think most people would probably grade the programs I have just identified as an F minus.
The towns, cities and rural municipalities with which I deal are much more fiscally responsible with the dollars they manage than anyone in the government, by a mile and a half. I would even say the NDP government, which is an awful admission for me in the province of Saskatchewan, is even more fiscally responsible than that outfit over there.
I do not think any province or municipality has to take lectures from anyone on that side of the House about fiscal responsibility. There is a damning indictment of the government and its mismanagement of our finances from the Auditor General. What I find really amazing is this. Of all the government departments we have in Ottawa, what department did Treasury Board propose to reduce by 15%? The Auditor General's department.