Mr. Speaker, the mandate of the Standing Committee on Public Accounts is clear: to oversee the federal government's expenditures.
When a border infrastructure fund magically morphs into a minister's personal slush fund, change is needed.
Instead, the committee's report tabled yesterday is weak and sanitized and overlooks the serious ethical failures of this government. Important witnesses were never invited, little work was done on this subject, and all our efforts to have the Auditor General appear as a witness were nipped in the bud by the Conservative majority.
So the Conservative majority on the committee was busy avoiding the hard questions and making sure the Auditor General was blocked from appearing. This is absolutely shameful. Will this report become the new gold standard of Conservative whitewashing? Can Canadians expect the same kind of kid-gloves treatment on the next Conservative boondoggles?
If the government is unwilling to examine its mistakes, the least it could do is get out of the way while the opposition does its job to uncover the truth.