moved that the third report of the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs presented on Monday, December 2, 2013, be concurred in.
Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with my good friend, the member for Skeena—Bulkley Valley, who will be speaking in the second half of the debate that starts today on the committee report from the procedure and House affairs committee.
I would like to start by underscoring what is nothing less than a betrayal of the Canadian public by Conservative and Liberal members of that committee.
Members will recall that back in June, the NDP brought forward a motion that was adopted unanimously. Members from all sides of the supported the following motion:
That...in order to bring full transparency and accountability to the House of Commons spending, the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs be instructed to:
(i) conduct open and public hearings with a view to replace the Board of Internal Economy with an independent oversight body;
(ii) invite the Auditor General, the Clerk and the Chief Financial Officer of the House of Commons to participate fully in these hearings;
(iii) study the practices of provincial and territorial legislatures, as well as other jurisdictions and Westminster-style Parliaments in order to compare and contrast their administrative oversight;
(iv) propose modifications to the Parliament of Canada Act, the Financial Administration Act, the Auditor General Act and any other acts, as deemed necessary;
(v) propose any necessary modifications to the administrative policies and practices of the House of Commons;
The committee was to report its findings to the House no later than December 2, 2013, in order to have any proposed changes to expensed disclosure and reporting in place for the beginning of the next fiscal year.
The intent was very clear. At that time, back in June—members will recall it is the work of the NDP for generations, pushing for more transparency and more disclosure—we finally got members of the government and the other parties to agree to that motion.
What happened?
I will say that the Conservatives kept their word to bring the Auditor General forward. I would like to cite what the Auditor General said at the procedure and House affairs committee when asked the question about doing away with this secretive Board of Internal Economy.
Of course, what Canadians want to see is more transparency around expenses. The NDP offered that, with the motion. What did the Auditor General say? The Auditor General, who I think has the respect of all Canadians, said the following in testimony to the procedure and House affairs committee:
In my opinion, governance can be strengthened by having an independent body that would either advise the Board of Internal Economy or be given the responsibility for all matters related to members' expenses and entitlements. [...] it is important that Canadians are confident that its membership is independent and that the members have been chosen in a non-partisan manner.
The Auditor General could not have been more clear. The Auditor General said that the NDP motion regarding doing away with the secretive Board of Internal Economy and putting in place independent monitoring of MPs' expenses was a good idea.
If we asked Canadians, they would say that the Auditor General makes sense. The Auditor General defends the public interest, often with some difficulty. As we well know, under the current government the Conservatives have hacked and slashed his budget, while they have increased ministerial funding, with their limousines, the Prime Minister flying around the world, and spending a lot of money on their own pet projects. I would mention the $40 billion that I think they want to spend for the F-35s.
At the same time that they have been spending a lot of money on their pet projects, because Conservatives love being big spenders on themselves, they have been hacking and slashing the Auditor General's department. The Auditor General is still doing tremendous work.
On this side of the House, the NDP supports the work of the Auditor General. An NDP government would fully fund the Auditor General's operations so that Canadians would be confident that money is being spent on the public interest. That is something we have been saying all along.
We have a unanimous adoption of an NDP motion in this House. Following that, we have the Auditor General saying, “Gosh, the NDP is right. The NDP has been right along. We need an independent body. We need to do away with that secretive bureau of Internal economy”.
What would one think, then, that the report from the procedure and House affairs committee would say as its first recommendation? What would it say? It should say to do away with this secretive non-transparent Board of Internal Economy. However, tragically, that is not what this report says.
We also had other witnesses, like the Information Commissioner, who said very clearly that MPs' expenses should be subject to the Access to Information Act to enhance public trust. Witnesses coming before the committee said very clearly that the NDP's approach was the right one. Initially, in June at least, Conservative and Liberal members agreed that doing away with the Board of Internal Economy was the right approach.
Now we arrive at the actual report itself, and it basically says to have the status quo, that the status quo is all right, that not having access to information on parliamentary expenses is okay, that having a secretive Board of Internal Economy with no transparency is somehow all right. In fact, if we sum up, the title of the report of the procedure and House affairs committee should be “Business as Usual Say Conservatives and Liberals: we want to keep doing things the old way”.
Canadians disagree profoundly with that. They see the old way as leading to this myriad of Senate scandals of Conservative and Liberal senators tied up with illegal spending. They see the old way as involving the RCMP in trying to sort out where these illegal expenses occurred and following up with charges, as we are now starting to see. The old way is the way that Canadians are rejecting. In fact, I recall Conservatives saying, back in 2011, that they reject the old way, that they would make things transparent in Ottawa and would move to do away with the secrecy.