Madam Speaker, the member for Yukon raises an extremely important issue of government accountability.
It is worth bearing in mind that the leitmotif of the Conservatives since they arrived has been to do as they say, not as they do.
Yesterday when the Speaker of the House granted our request that a question of privilege be referred to the procedure and House affairs committee, the Conservatives recognized that taking in confidential prebudgetary information and transferring it to Conservative lobbyists was of course a breach, and now it is going to be dealt with in committee.
There has been a whole series of behaviours like that. A staffer of the Minister of Natural Resources was caught, and let us not forget that we only catch a certain number of things the Conservatives do, interfering illegally in the process of access to information. Again, it was only when that staffer was caught that they finally fired him. That is another repeat behaviour; whenever the Conservatives get caught doing something wrong, they turn around and fire a junior staffer. That is supposed to take care of the problem.
With regard to government expenses, we should also look at what happened with the infrastructure spending. People like Louis Ranger, a 35-year career civil servant, senior deputy minister of transport, were being forced and pushed. These are high-level people who understood one thing. When the Conservatives came in, they said that they were bringing in an accountability act. That meant they were trying to shove onto the backs of the senior civil service their own ministerial responsibility. It is a notion that is completely foreign to the Conservatives, the notion that is the basis of our parliamentary system of government, of individual ministerial responsibility.
The Conservatives named the deputy ministers, the civil servants, as being responsible in the Federal Accountability Act, and they are still trying to strong arm them on a lot of these files.
Taking $16 billion of taxpayers' money without even a competitive bidding process is the most egregious example in Canadian history of misspent public money. It is a proper scandal. The government should be held to account for it.