Mr. Speaker, despite what the President of the Treasury Board would have us believe, the government had received as early as 1996 a report from the accounting firm Ernst & Young—audits are not done unless there is a problem. This report referred to various problems within the communications and public opinion research branch headed by Chuck Guité.
How can the government continue to claim that the sponsorship scandal was the work of only a small group of public servants, when Jean Chrétien and the then Minister of Public Works and Government Services asked for an additional $17 million in federal funds for Chuck Guité's team even though the government was aware of the abuses?