Madam Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity to rise today and speak in this debate. As a lot of people have figured out, this is a rather strange motion that is presently before the House. I find it almost weird.
The opposition has dragged up a previous report of the public accounts committee. I should point out that I am now and have been for three or four years a member of the public accounts committee. This report has some age on it. It dealt with the Office of the Privacy Commissioner. The opposition wants to make an amendment to this report and send it back to the committee, I suppose. The Leader of the Opposition, in what I consider to be this very unhealthy and unnatural quest for power, has sought and received the alliance or the partnership of the Bloc Québécois.
Before I speak to the motion, I do want to point out that I do find this a very unhealthy alliance. It is not a Canadian alliance, this partnership that we see developing before our very eyes.
We have all attended marriage ceremonies and we have all heard the priest or the minister ask whether or not there is any reason why two parties should not be joined. I have never heard anyone respond that they should not be joined.
But in this case, I am going to stand in the House and I will say to this House and to all Canadians that these two parties should not be joined. It is an unholy marriage. It is an unholy marriage and one that I find offensive to Canadian values, one that I am sure will offend each and every Canadian listening to this show here tonight.
I will deal with the motion itself. First of all, I want to point out that the Office of the Privacy Commissioner is one of five offices that report directly to Parliament. The most common one, and the one that members of this House and Canadians are most familiar with, is the Office of the Auditor General. The Office of the Privacy Commissioner is similar. It reports directly to Parliament.
To go back to the Office of the Auditor General, it has approximately 500 employees. The Auditor General operates with a budget that is now in excess of $50 million. Again, though, that office does not report to the Minister of Public Works and Government Services or to the Minister of Industry. It reports to Parliament.
It is the same situation with the Office of the Privacy Commissioner. That office reports to Parliament. The incumbent Privacy Commissioner is an officer of Parliament. He or she, whatever the case may be, works for Parliament, not for the Government of Canada. No minister within the Government of Canada can tell either the Auditor General or the present Privacy Commissioner what he or she can do.
However, as Canadians would expect, those offices and the administration of those offices have to comply with certain rules and regulations, especially in dealing with financial matters. The two most prevalent are of course the Financial Administration Act and all Treasury Board guidelines. No one would expect anything less.
However, there was a previous Privacy Commissioner, about which there are some well known facts, and let me note here that the Privacy Commissioner's office is not a great big office like the Auditor General's, but it does fulfill a very important role for all Canadians. That office was not being managed in a manner that met Treasury Board guidelines or the terms and conditions of the Financial Administration Act, and it certainly did not meet the test of financial probity that Canadians would expect of an officer of Parliament.
On this matter, we are really talking about a motion of the public accounts committee, but I should report what a lot of people in the House are fully aware of. A lot of the heavy lifting, a lot of the real work, was actually done by another committee, the government operations and estimates committee. It was the committee that probed into the administration of this office, and again I will say that this office is not a department of government. It is an office of Parliament.
That committee found wrongdoing, but it did not find it easily. It was a very lengthy process that required a lot of work, time and effort by all members of the committee. I sat through at least two of the meetings. It was a committee that really worked well.
I believe there were 16 members at the time, all of whom came together because the committee was being given false information by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner. It took a lot of investigative work to get to the right information and finally the committee did. The committee members then wrote a report, which very quickly, as we all know, led to the dismissal or resignation of the Privacy Commissioner.
I want to point out and highlight again that this office had nothing to do with the Government of Canada. The person was an officer of Parliament.
Before that, the issue had actually come to the public accounts committee. The committee probed into the whole issue and wrote a report. That is quite some time ago now. What actually happened was that the Privacy Commissioner was either dismissed or resigned before he was dismissed. A new Privacy Commissioner was appointed. The whole office was revamped or reorganized. I assume that the office is now being operated in a manner that meets all Treasury Board guidelines and all the terms and conditions of the Financial Administration Act, along with the certain condition of financial probity which all Canadians would expect to see.
Really, it is an issue of problems developing in that office. The office was investigated properly by an all party committee of the House, which did an excellent job. When one looks at the report and sifts through the evidence presented at the hearings, one sees that it all distills down to the fact that the real problem was not with the lower level employees or the administrators of this particular office, which, I will say again, was rather small compared to government standards. It basically arose from the then Privacy Commissioner himself. Once he was replaced, it very quickly became a well run office.
That committee did its work and the public accounts committee did its work. It filed a report. Again, this is something that is past us. There has now been quite a bit of time spent on it. I am quite perplexed and bewildered and confused as to why this issue is being debated, discussed and talked about in the House right now.
I assume that this is perhaps more of the games being played in the House. It is unfortunate. I thought that after the weekend break we would come back here on Monday, get back to business and accomplish some of the initiatives that Canadians want us to do.
I must tell everyone in this House and every Canadian watching this show that I feel it is unfortunate we are here debating this motion. I think Canadians out there are certainly shaking their heads now about this very unholy marriage, as I call it, between the opposition Conservatives and the Bloc Québécois, which has resulted in this motion.
As the previous speaker has alluded to, very correctly, this is just another game that we are seeing here in Ottawa now. It is unfortunate and it is distasteful, but again, we have a Leader of the Opposition who has this unhealthy and unnatural thirst for power and this is just one of the things we are seeing as a result. We are probably are going to see more tomorrow.
It is probably fair to say that tomorrow there will be another motion put forward by the Leader of the Opposition. If he can get the support of the Bloc Québécois, which I assume is quite prepared to support him in his quest here today in this House and in front of all Canadians, if he can get the Bloc's support to come together in this alliance, I assume we are going to have another motion tomorrow, and we will have one on Wednesday and we will have one on Thursday, and we may or we may not have one on Friday.
If I may continue on this whole issue, this situation we are dealing with in the House, I returned to my riding last weekend and spoke to a lot of people there. If I may summarize, what they told me is that they do not see any need for an election right now. They find this alliance as unhealthy and as distasteful as I do.
Back in June of last year, they told me, they collectively, as Canadians, elected a minority government and they as Canadians expected the members of Parliament who were elected to come to Ottawa and work in their best interests. They told me that this is not what they are seeing at this point. On that, I do have to agree with them.
They also told me that they are pleased with the last budget tabled by the finance minister. I believe it is fair to say that it did meet the expectations and the objectives of Canadians from coast to coast to coast.
It has been supported by a vast majority of Canadians, including at one time, I should add, the leader of the official opposition. It did contain the initiatives, the programs and the policies Canadians told us they wanted to see fulfilled. In the last election, which was held in the latter part of May and the early part of June last year, that is what they told us. That is what they have told us since then. It is my belief that we did respond when that budget was tabled just recently here.
We have talked about some of the initiatives that were in that budget. They have been repeated in the House. It will be very unfortunate for Canadians if this budget dies on the order paper because of the games we are seeing in this House at this very point in time.
One of the initiatives that is very near and dear to the heart of the people in the province I come from is the $5 billion fund under the new deal, as it is called, for cities, towns and municipalities. This is something that they have been waiting for. Cities, towns and municipalities have been lobbying for this. They have been talking about it for years. This initiative, announced in the last budget, was very welcome to all the administrations, to all the elected officials and, I should say, to all the residents who live in these cities, towns and communities right across Canada.
Another initiative, which a lot of people are concerned about right now, is the early childhood development funding announced by our Minister of Social Development. There were some funds put in by the Government of Canada under the early childhood development agreement which went a certain way in this regard. Again, Canadians were telling us, and I believe they were telling every member of this House, that the Government of Canada had to do more in this regard. This issue was so fundamental to the education of our youth that it was incumbent upon the Government of Canada to do this.
I could go on and on. The budget is very comprehensive. It basically adds a lot of funding to the social programs that Canadians wanted the government to fulfill, and that has been done.
The motion is so ridiculous and weird that it is difficult to get up here and speak to the it. I think anyone who is watching this and reviewing these proceedings can see right through it. It is just a charade. It is a game. It is an abuse of the House and it hijacks what we are supposed to be doing.
I should be here talking about other issues that are important to Canadians. I could talk for hours about everything that is in the budget and about some of the programs that have been announced since the budget. However, I am getting short of time.
I was party to preparing the report. I thought it was a good report. We tabled it with the House, although I should point out that it was not our committee that did most of the work. It was the other committee that did an excellent job on this. This issue was dealt with by the House. I have to give credit to all the members of the committee who worked hard on the issue. It was a very difficult situation. The issue we are talking about right now was dealt with several years ago.
What we have right now is an abuse, a game. I believe the Canadian public watching these proceedings, this sideshow, can see right through what the Leader of the Opposition is attempting to do to the House, to this institution and to the people who live in Canada. I would urge all members to firmly vote against the motion.
I appreciate the time allowed to me to debate this very unpleasant motion that is being brought upon the Canadian people.