Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to rise and debate this issue today, which is a very timely one. As we know, the Auditor General reported just last week and in her report provided some substantive and pretty substantial criticism of how the government deals with the issue of money going into foundations.
I will start by pointing out that one of the most basic roles a parliament plays is to ensure that the public's money is well spent and spent in a transparent way. If we look back over the history of parliament, we discover that parliament was born for that reason. I was doing a little research and found that in 1254 sheriffs of the various counties in England sent knights of the shire to advise the king on finance, precisely because it became pretty obvious, even at that time, 750 years ago, that it was important to have representatives from local areas go and talk to the Crown, in that case, about how money was being spent.
Of course over the hundreds of years since that time, parliaments more and more have played the role of being a check on the expenditures of government, but the only way that can happen is if there is transparency and if the government ensures that the money it brings in through taxation and various levies actually stays within the parameters of parliament, where parliament can actually scrutinize what is going on. That is a very ancient tradition and it has been there for a very good reason.
It is important that we fulfill our obligations to ensure that people's money is well spent. I want to point out that in Canada today people work extraordinarily hard and pay very heavy taxes. As I pointed out yesterday in this place, the average Canadian earning $35,000 in Ontario pays $17,175 in taxes, according to the Fraser Institute. Forty-nine per cent of that income goes to taxes. I think that is an outrageous number and I think people would agree.
Apart from the fact that Canadians are taxed too heavily, we want to know that the money being taken from them is actually going to something that benefits them. It is reasonable for Canadians to say that if that amount of money is going to be taken from them, which is way too much, they should at least know that their representatives can scrutinize how it is being spent.
As we know, the Auditor General concluded that the government is not ensuring that there is parliamentary oversight of this spending. There was concern about ministerial oversight. There was concern about the lack of performance audits and the fact that the Auditor General could not go in and audit these various foundations to ensure that the money going in there is actually producing results for Canadians. Because that is the point, of course: this money is not there just to go into a big slush fund to be used in whatever way the government wants to use it down the road. It is there to serve the public.
Since 1997 when the government first started doing this, the Auditor General complained about it and said the government should not do this, that it really is a violation of everything we have always believed about transparency and accountability. Since that time the government has funnelled over $9 billion into these foundations and $7.7 billion still sits there today. In other words, the government set up these foundations and the money has been funnelled in, but we are not seeing it used to some good effect for Canadians, with some rare examples.
We know that in the past, although this was not the subject of the Auditor General's report we are talking about today, there has actually been some criticism of how that money is being used by these foundations. There was a news story a couple of years ago about Canada Health Infoway, which is there to ensure that people in the medical community can use high tech services like the Internet to become more efficient. Canada Health Infoway was going to help with that.
One of the reports that came out indicated that doctors who were using this service found that it was a nightmare, but we as a Parliament have no way of scrutinizing this because we do not get proper reporting, according to the Auditor General. The Auditor General does not have the ability to scrutinize the books of these foundations and cannot do these performance audits to determine if we are really getting value for money.
In the current context that should concern everybody in this place, because in the current context, of course, we have an inquiry right now looking into how $100 million was misspent by the government through the public works department and the sponsorship program. Thus, I would argue that this is not some academic discussion. I think it has real consequences for Canadians today.
It is the obligation of the government to respect that age-old tradition that Parliament has oversight of the public money, of the public purse, precisely because we do not want to see that money being used for things it should not be used for. We do not want to see it potentially used for things that are completely antithetical to the public interest. We have no assurance of that today. We are not talking about a little bit of money. We are talking about $9 billion that has been funnelled there. That is a tremendous amount of money.
I want to point out, too, and I think this is an important point, that it was the current Prime Minister when he was the finance minister who made the decision to start doing this. It is important to understand what has happened or why this all occurred initially. Going back to 1997, when the government started running surpluses, it has been absolutely Machiavellian how the government has handled the manipulation of the surpluses that the country has run since that time.
In this case, the government broke all the accounting rules, broke the tradition of Parliament and put this money into these foundations, but that was only the tip of the iceberg. It was $9 billion. Since 1997, $95 billion in surpluses that were not forecast has been manipulated in various ways, manipulated so that the public has had no say in how that money would be spent.
I am a member of the finance committee and my friend over here is the vice-chair for the official opposition. When we sit down in the fall and go through the prebudget hearings we have a role to play. Our role, allegedly anyway, is to gather input from the public and provide a report to the finance minister that will give him guidance on what to include in the budget and how to spend the money that the government forecasts coming in. Unfortunately, the government has never really been very upfront with Canadians about the size of the surplus that it has anticipated. In the last number of years since 1997 we have actually had $95 billion in surpluses that were not forecast by the government. The government consistently lowballed these figures.
One way the government has dealt with this is to create these foundations and slide $9 billion of that over into these foundations. Again, these foundations are not even doing anything to a large degree today. Some of them have administrations of 30 people and have spent almost nothing of the hundreds of millions of dollars that they have sitting in accounts. It is not clear what they are doing.
Of course I have heard the protestations from the other side of the House. They say the Auditor General is not criticizing these foundations, which is true, but the point is that the Auditor General really cannot criticize them because she does not have access to their books. It is a very disingenuous argument that members on the other side raise. If the Auditor General had access to the books to determine whether or not Canadians were getting value for money, we might find out that she had some very stern criticisms of these foundations. I would just like to encourage the government to be more honest in its refutation of some of these arguments.
My final point is that justice must not only be done, it must be seen to be done. It may well be that some of these foundations are doing good work, but forgive me for saying that I am not quite prepared to take the government's word for it, especially in the light of sponsorship, the firearms registry debacle and the $350 million in Davis Inlet that came to no good effect. I would like to know that the Auditor General had the ability to look at those books.
In conclusion, my motion reads:
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.