Madam Speaker, I am certainly not in a position to continue the debate of the previous speaker. I am kind of shocked that a member would regard the situation in Darfur as just a political issue, a location where there is what we regard as abject lawlessness, where men, women and children are being killed.
Notwithstanding the efforts of the African Union and the United Nations, more has to be done there to protect what life there still is in Darfur. Thousands and thousands of people are huddled around in camps because they are at risk of death or being maimed or raped if they move.
I do not accept that the Darfur issue around here is purely an issue of party politics. I regret that the new member is falling into a pattern of regarding the debate around here as just politics. I am not sure Canadians will be tuning in much longer to hear the political rhetoric.
I would like to get back to the motion even though it has been radically altered to conform to the Conservatives' plan here. I will speak to the main motion through the amendment if I can, as difficult as that may be to do.
The original motion had to do with the committee report that looked through the financial circumstances surrounding the Office of the Privacy Commissioner. That was what I would call a three-headed monster at one point in time. It was a matter that I, as a member, worked on for awhile. It seemed to me at the time that the Office of the Privacy Commissioner had been spun off like a satellite. It was out of touch with the normal accounting processes that were in place around here. As it was spun off, as it carried on its work on behalf of Parliament for Canadians, there was an obvious reduction in transparency and very reluctant accountability.
I just want to make a note here that the Privacy Commissioner was and is an officer of Parliament, not a functionary of the government, not a civil servant nor a public servant in that sense, but someone who serves Parliament as an officer of Parliament. In that regard, it is Parliament that would normally carry the can on accountability. It is Parliament that authorizes the money for spending and it is Parliament that should be providing the management vehicle, in this case not the fault of the former privacy commissioner. In a sense, Parliament and, a bit more broadly, the government, did not have its act together.
A whole list of issues come to mind now as we look back 10 and 20 years. As the parliamentary component of governance has grown, we have not grown the management infrastructure there. Even today we are working on the funding mechanism for officers of Parliament and other issues.
In this particular case, when problems became apparent it was up to Parliament to ferret out the facts and find out what was happening so we began our work. It was not easy to do. For that period, I sat on the government operations committee which was an all party committee. All members worked hard and eventually we succeeded in finding out enough information that allowed us to bring the matter back to the House, in the end as a contempt matter.
It was a difficult thing to do but at the time it was acknowledged that there were three other offices of Parliament that could bring some expertise to bear: the Office of the Auditor General, the Public Service Commission and the Treasury Board. Those three bodies responded at the time and responded very aggressively on behalf of Parliament, on behalf of the taxpayer, in an attempt to regularize what was happening in the Office of the Privacy Commissioner.
The same thing happens in the corporate world. When people do funny things with money they do not write a press release. They hide it. They bury it. It is actually quite difficult to find these things when they are going on. I say again that it happens in government, in business and probably in families but we need to have the mechanisms and the transparency that will allow us to find these things.
I want to acknowledge the work of the Auditor General, the Public Service Commission and the Treasury Board in responding to both the report from the government operations committee and the report of the public accounts committee. Both these parliamentary committees were active and busy in trying to essentially fix what was broken and clean up what was, in light of the size of government, a small problem but every dollar is worth a dollar. This was a small department.
In thinking back to the years 1993, 1894 and 1995 it was a time when under program review the government attempted to reduce the expenses of government. I was not working in that area at the time but the government decided to reduce the number of comptrollers. We are getting back into very boring territory but the comptrollers are the people who essentially oversee the spending directly. They do not actually write the cheques but they make sure everybody is following the right procedures when money is spent. The number of comptrollers was reduced. I fear that the reduction, with the objective of saving money, actually ended up costing us a lot of money.
However over the year it might be interesting to see just how much misspending, unfortunate spending, regrettable spending and improper spending there was over the period with the reduced number of comptrollers. The government has now decided that there will be more comptrollers. We are investing in a whole new mechanism of comptrollers. It will take a couple of years to get them all back in place but that I am sure will provide for better public spending.
A lot of us use the airport parkway. I can recall that in about 1991 I was sitting in opposition. I see a member opposite who was actually sitting in government then. As an opposition member I used the parkway to the airport. The National Capital Commission, which maintains that roadway, decided at the time to replace the shoulders right up to the pavement of the road with grass much as exists in the Gatineau parkway. It is a lovely parkway road up in the Gatineau. The NCC wanted to do the same thing on the way to the airport on this side of the river.
The NCC loaded all the gravel on the shoulders for about four kilometres or five kilometres on both sides of the road and then brought in lovely new loam soil. It was put down at the side of the road. It looked like a garden getting ready to happen. It then brought in sod and put it down. It was looking pretty good for the first couple of days. It took them some weeks to do this. It was a big project. I do not know how much money was involved but it was a lot.
Son of a gun, drivers actually did not stay on the paved road. A lot of them pulled off to the side which put tire marks and ruts into all the lovely new grass and soil that was probably imported from some place in Manitoba. After a while it started to look like a grass parking lot after a rainstorm.
I felt bad about what had happened because I was looking forward to having a parkway as lovely as the one in the Gatineau. Son of a gun, if the NCC did not change its mind and along came the bulldozers. They pulled up all the sod and the soil and got a new kind of gravel from somewhere else and laid it down on both sides of the road for 4, 5, 6 or 7 kilometres. Someone made a bad decision, which is what that was all about. It was not necessarily a stupid decision or a corrupt decision. The NCC wanted to make the road look better. However it probably cost us $10 million or $20 million.
I was in opposition at the time so I poked around a little bit but in the end the money was spent. That is an example of how in government things can just go wrong and money gets misspent. In the private sector people might actually be fired. The private sector might actually tell its employees that the project was so dumb that it could not keep them around anymore and they had to get out.
In government, however, it is more of a collective decision. There is usually not one person involved. I can assure the House that the government did not write a press release when that roadway was finished a year or two later. I was so embarrassed I just wanted to forget about it.
That is not being partisan. It does not matter which party is in government because when the stuff goes bad it goes bad. It is not political dollars. It is taxpayers' dollars.
In any event, that takes us back to the current motion. As we all recall, the motion was to concur in the public accounts committee report on the subject of the financial management of the Office of the Privacy Commissioner. The motion has now been converted into a non-confidence motion that would bring a vote at some point in the House.
It seems like every avenue we try to go down we just end up coming back to the same old politics. It looks like it is going to be that way. All the opposition wants is a vote. The two opposition parties on that side of the House seem to think that they will win the vote. They do not know whether they are going to win the vote but they want to have a vote. They think that if they win the vote it will trigger an election, which it may do. However the government has to be defeated on a confidence motion that is a real confidence motion, not a fake confidence motion.
The amendment to the motion that we are debating here says that we will take that committee report, which was a good committee report, and we will gut it. We will drop everything in it, send it back to the committee with magic words about non-confidence and we will get the committee to re-report that. In other words, we will send the report back with a little grenade, get the committee to report the grenade back to the House and then we will vote on this like a time bomb. That is pretty cynical procedure.
I actually have to allow the opposition the right and ability to do that because the job of the opposition is to test the government. I just regret that it seems to be almost 100% of the stuff we are doing around here now is this testing, because there are still some good things happening around here. The opposition will not agree with that but I am seeing it. If we read our newspapers carefully we will see it. The government is still accomplishing things and that is because the government is not what is in the House.
The government is made up of all those civil servants who are spending about $150 billion, $160 billion of taxpayers' money. They are out there doing the good work. The government and its ministries develop policy. All that is good stuff, unless we are talking about the NCC roadway that I mentioned earlier. Maybe the government is not 10 out of 10 all the time, but there is a lot of good stuff happening.
Canadians had a very good weekend as we opened the new war museum and paid tribute to our veterans. I felt very good about that. That was a non-partisan piece of governance and I thought it went very well for the country. No one here would argue with that, I am sure.
We have this very partisan, 10 out of 10 delivery of landmines here intended to, at least at this point, cause a vote. We will have a vote. I will be one of the 308 members. Just for the record, I know there are 308 MPs. One is the Speaker and one of our seats is vacant. We are waiting for a byelection in Labrador. I am hoping the new member will be from the party that I know best, the Liberal Party.
However, the voters in Labrador will know what is best and I will have to accept their judgment, whatever that is. There will be 306 of us who will have a chance to vote. I am hoping that the vote will not be on the motion we have cynically floated by the House today. I am hoping it will be on a matter of substance and a matter dealing with the budget.
There is a tonne, a list this long of things in the budget. Maybe not every Canadian agrees with everything in the budget, but there are a whole lot of good things in there, dealing with infrastructure for our cities, early learning, and reinvestment in our armed forces. The record here is replete with discussion on the budget.
Regrettably, we are not discussing the budget now, but that debate must be imminent. I am encouraging the government House leadership to get to a debate on the budget as soon as we can. When that debate is near the end, then we will have a vote. That vote will be a confidence vote not because we make it that but because a money bill, a budget vote, is a confidence vote.
In the meantime, I have some work to do. My colleagues on this side of the House have work to do and there are probably some members in opposition who have work to do. I am hoping they will get a chance to do it with all the political rhetoric going on because it has not helped the House too much. The rhetoric is getting so sharp that some of us are getting awfully distracted. I admit I get a little distracted at times by the sharpness of the rhetoric. It is not necessary to be that sharp. We could probably do a little better.
I am hopeful that colleagues on both sides of the House will have a few more days, a few more weeks or, who knows, a few more months to make this Parliament work. That is what my constituents want me to do. I will continue to do that, but I know we will have a vote coming up. I am getting ready for that as are members opposite. On this side we are planning to win that vote.