Mr. Speaker, let me thank the hon. member for telling me, telling you and telling the whole House how incompetent the minister of finance really was.
I was in government and I was a minister. I ran the department and I knew what was going on in my department. I did not get in trouble nor did any of my people because we did what we were supposed to do. We looked after the money that came to us from Treasury Board and Finance but we had to account for it.
Government or ministers of finance or presidents of Treasury Board or treasury boards do not throw out money to departments and say, “Here you are, little boys and girls, do whatever you want with that money”. Everyone has to be accountable, which means that the people in charge of the purse, Treasury Board and Finance, must follow the dollar. In this case, they did not follow the millions of dollars, not to say the dollar.
Can we absolve the Prime Minister because as minister of finance he did not know? If he did not know, he should have known.