Mr. Speaker, the member for Wellington—Halton Hills has put his finger on something that I know in my past life as a lawyer and in my academic studies in law school we spent a lot of time on. It is the concern about discretion in the administrative process.
By that we mean when we take the power to make decisions away from those who are accountable, meaning Parliament, a provincial legislature or a municipal council, and put that decision making power into the hands of unaccountable bureaucrats and officials and those against whom there is no right to appeal the decisions, those who we do not have a right to see true accountability for the decisions that are made, that is a slippery path.
When society becomes increasingly sophisticated, which, unfortunately, is all too common, it is something that becomes very common when government becomes big.
The government has been growing at a rate of 10% a year. Is it any surprise that as the public service grows and the cost of program spending grows that we see the spread of unaccountable discretion in the process where unaccountable, faceless, nameless bureaucrats make decisions, such as in the area for which I am the critic, Human Resources and Skills Development Canada where every day the lives of thousands of people are affected by decisions made by civil servants acting entirely on their own discretion and applying their own judgments?
What happens is that when the process occurs it is not just inequity and unfairness. It is also an invitation to political interference. We saw that happen in the sponsorship scandal and with the former HRDC scandal because then people could plead their case for special treatment. If they were well connected politically and if they knew the right people, suddenly the special treatment came forward.
When that is all hidden by depositing it at a level beyond the scrutiny of the public, the voters, and it is put in the hands of faceless, nameless officials who do it quietly with a phone call from the minister's office, or in their own discretion and judgment based on their own biases, prejudices or personal appeals, who knows what, then bad things happen.
If we think about the places in the world that have a lot of corruption, countries that we like to think of as banana republics or third world dictatorships, that is what is happening. That is when officials take to themselves the power to make decisions, to give out licences and to impose conditions on licences and in the process extract favours from those who are seeking the licences and permissions.
Anyone who has ever tried to do business in a place like Russia today will say that that is the kind of thing they encounter from officials at every step of the way. Why? It is because those officials have the ability to make decisions in their judgment and with their discretion that affect the livelihoods and day to day well-being and survival of people trying to start businesses or trying to get by, trying to do the things they want to do in a society that they otherwise thought would be free.
It is important that this decision making power not be vested in those who are unaccountable but rather that there remain parliamentary oversight, that there is responsibility, that there is accountability and that when decisions are made people are responsible for them.
We have had countless scandals in the time that the Liberal Party has been in government and yet no minister has ever resigned or taken responsibility. It is always the work of somebody else, some nameless, faceless parallel organization, some officials acting unaccountably.
We had the parliamentary secretary come to us today and say that was a good thing, that was the way things should work and that everyone thinks it is all right for regulations to be made unaccountably and without authority because that is what is needed to make things work.
I do not think that is the way we need to have things to make them work. I think things work best when people are responsible and there is accountability. We do not get that out of this legislation.