Well, it might be a very worthwhile program and something that we could really get excited about and get involved in but I very much doubt it.
On top of that, these government dollars seem to flow from one department to the other. Some of the expenditures that one would think would be within the Department of Natural Resources would be for projects like streamlining the regulatory process in preparation for the northern pipeline project to come on stream but it pops up under Indian Affairs and Northern Development.
We see one line under the Department of Natural Resources which reads contributions in support of aboriginal consultations on the long term management of nuclear fuel waste in Canada. I asked the minister what that was doing in there. We passed a bill in the House that transferred full responsibility for those consultations to the corporations that produce the waste and yet we are spending $1.3 million on this process of consultation.
It is no wonder the government gets into the kind of problems it does, such as the ad scam, when this process of accountability is so convoluted, so general and so vague that no one can see where the government has spent its money.
We sit around here with our eyes glazed over like a bunch of robots and we automatically vote against the government's spending estimates because we have no idea why it is spending the money. The government, because of its majority, votes for it and it passes. Life goes on and another Parliament comes along and we begin the process again.
Every once in a while there is a glitch in the system and the government is exposed for money laundering through the ad agencies in Quebec. However that will go away too, and the sooner the better as far as the Prime Minister is concerned.
If he goes to the polls and gets what he hopes for, which is another mandate from the people of Canada and a majority government, what happens to the issue of the $100 million, for which we received no value, or, as the former prime minister said, “there may have been a few hundred million dollars stolen but it was worth it. In the big scheme of things we saved Canada,” he said. “So if someone stole some money it was okay?”
If we as Canadians give the government another mandate for another five years, we can bet that the investigation into the ad scam will end. The government will be able to say that it does not need to investigate it any more because Canadians are confident that it can look after their money properly.
I am sure after I have long left this place there will be similar scandals that will come forward and they will be treated in the same way. That is wrong. The system that we have set up for transparency and accountability is there but it has been corrupted over the years and it needs to be fixed.
Before Canadians vote in the upcoming election they need to know from the parties running how the government will fix the system so that it cannot be corrupted and abused in the way it is being abused now. The system should work and it should be transparent. The government should be accountable and it should be answerable to the Canadian people for every last cent of money that it spends. However, under the current system, it certainly is not and I think that is absolutely unacceptable.
I have no confidence that the Liberals are prepared to change that system. They will simply get past this scandal, move on to the next one and we will get more of the same.