Mr. Speaker, what the Prime Minister and the Liberals have done is use an accounting trick to mislead Canadians. They have told us that our surplus is much lower than it actually is because the excess money sitting in these foundations is, according to them, money already spent. However, the $7.7 billion surplus has been sitting in an unaccountable foundation out of sight and out of grasp of the Auditor General and outside the scope of the Access to Information Act.
While the Liberals have been throwing billions of dollars at unaccountable foundations, they continue to delay tax relief on hard-working Canadians, hard-working Canadians like the local farmers of my riding of Simcoe--Grey who continue to battle with the Canadian agriculture income stabilization program, the CAIS program, a program that has been universally rejected by producers across the country as a policy that unfairly hurts farmers.
Farmers in Simcoe--Grey have told me that the CAIS program is not working and it is not meeting their needs. In fact, the Liberal government has made the CAIS program so difficult that farmers must pay significant fees to farm accounts just to apply for the program.
It astounds me that government can so easily throw billions at unaccountable foundations to do whatever they please. However, it develops complicated funding programs for hard-working Canadians in desperate need.
The farming community is just one example. Municipalities across Canada have been looking for financial assistance to meet their infrastructure needs and have been left out in the cold.
Our seniors who have worked so hard for our country have been neglected by the government. Seniors should not have to worry about how they will pay for their medication. They should not have to take jobs long into retirement because the money they receive from government puts them below the poverty line. What really bothers me is, according to the Retirement Planning Institute, a significant number of Canadians do not receive proper Canada pension benefits. The government should be focusing on assisting our seniors. They should be respected and given the dignity they have earned.
The government needs to get its priorities straight. It needs to take immediate action to provide funding in areas that have been neglected, and it needs to be accountable for its funding decisions.
The Conservative Party of Canada agrees with the Auditor General when she said:
--decisions on funding and accountability should be based on the need for sound management of public funds; they should not be based on the goal of achieving a desired accounting result.
In other words, spend money where money is needed and account for it only when it is spent.
The Auditor General looked at three areas of accountability with respect to the foundations. She looked at reporting to Parliament, ministerial oversight and provision for external audit and evaluation. Her conclusion was that overall progress had been unsatisfactory.
This is the fourth time that the Auditor General has raised the issue of foundations with the government; first in 1997, then in November 1999, then in April 2002. The Liberals keep ignoring the warnings just like they did with the sponsorship program.
The bottom line is that the foundations are failing the most basic fundamentals of accountability. They are not answerable to Parliament through a minister, the Auditor General does not have access to them and Canadians have no idea if they get value for their $9 billion in hard-earned tax dollars.
The Auditor General also has indicated that the Treasury Board transfer policy, which came into effect in June 2000, requires departments to report to Parliament on transfer payments exceeding $5 million. They must include information such as objectives and expected results in reports on plans and priorities and evidence of related results achieved in departmental performance reports. However, the information tabled by the departments focused mainly on the foundations' expenditures and activities or on broad objectives that in many cases were not measurable. The outcomes or benefits for Canadians' hard-earned $9 billion was not adequately reported.
To date Liberals continue to deny the Auditor General access to foundations for no good reason. They claim foundations are doing good work for Canadians. If that is the case, why not open the books? What do they have to hide?
Canadians deserve results for their hard-earned tax dollars. The Auditor General's report on foundations has demonstrated that the Liberals continue to throw money around with little ministerial oversight, non-existent parliamentary oversight and with no accountability for their actions.
Once again, we see that the Liberal government and the Prime Minister have proved their lack of commitment toward running an open and transparent government.
I support today's motion, which reads as follows:
That the House call on the government to implement the measures recommended in the latest Auditor General's report to improve the framework for the accountability of foundations, in particular, to ensure that foundations are subject to performance audits that are reported to Parliament and that the Auditor General be appointed as the external auditor of foundations.
Canadians deserve accountability from the government, and they are sure not getting it from the Prime Minister and the Liberal government.