Mr. Speaker, I hope the Treasury Board president will stand fast for questions.
I am pleased to rise today to speak to the Liberal slush fund, vote 40 of the estimates. I want to quote from King Edward I when he said, “what touches all, should be approved by all, and it is also clear that common dangers should be met by measures agreed upon in common”. King Edward originally said this in 1295 when calling the model parliament. At the time, legislative authority was limited primarily to levying taxes. I am sure the current government would love to go back to that era when all parliament did was levy taxes. Edward's goal at the time was to raise funds for the campaign against the Scots and the French, nobel causes I guess, unless one happens to be French or Scottish.
What does this have to do with the budget? Some 753 years ago, King Edward I, in calling the model parliament, set up new functions for spending approvals and addressing grievances. The estimates, with their odious vote 40, violate such long-held functions of what touches all should be approved by all.
What is vote 40? It is basically a slush fund. I will give a quick glossary of some of the items we talked about today. For those watching at home wondering what we are doing, the estimates are basically the spending authority. The budget of course is just an aspirational thing. It is like having a plan to put something together, like perhaps a hockey rink on Parliament Hill, and they might come up with a budget of $8 million. Actually cutting the cheque and paying for it would be in the estimates, which is the spending authority. The public accounts, which I will talk about later, are the books that reconcile all the spending at the end of the year.
I want to read the PBO's letter about the public accounts, because it is important. Not one penny of the spending from the slush fund is going to show up detailed in the public accounts, unlike items such as the hockey rink, or perhaps the $200,000 Twitter account for the health minister. The $7.4 billion will not show up detailed in the public accounts. The Treasury Board president has tried to say otherwise, but the PBO says that currently the main summaries in volume 2, etc. provide dollar amounts to all authorities being transferred from each central vote. The spending data is rolled up and provided as a total number, not detailed, just a lump sum transfer.
There is no accountability for where this money is going to be spent. Why is that? It is basically to cover up the failed actions of the Treasury Board president. He promised us easier understanding of the spending, alignment of the estimates to the budget, and more transparency. We actually got the opposite. We get ministers not coming to committee to defend their spending. We have the Liberal members of the operations committee blocking. We tried repeatedly to add other meetings to have ministers and officials come and explain their spending. We were blocked. We had one extra meeting and Liberal members of OGGO actually walked out, denying us quorum. They had a chance to debate the $7.4 billion. It was the very first item we were debating. They walked out and deprived us the right to actually talk about it.
The voters put us here to approve all that touches us, and the Liberals are trying to stop us. They are the same people who gave us ad scam, the same people who had 10% of their cabinet under ethics investigations. It would have been 13%, but they threw out one of the members, the member for Calgary Centre. The Prime Minister and finance minister have been investigated under ethics. Of course it was not the first finance minister investigated. The current public safety minister, when he was finance minister, was also investigated for ethics.
With all these ethics issues, these are the same people who are saying give us $7 billion of taxpayers' money with no oversight, no plan, and no scrutiny. Remember, not one penny of the $7.4 billion slush fund shows up in any of the departmental plans. Why is that? We were told the plans are not mature. We were told they could not tell us what the money is for in the slush fund because they have not come up with a plan. They have no backup on how they got to the $7.4 billion and what will be spent from the program, but they do want us to preapprove it. they want it to be spent and never seen again. The government's own lauded GC InfoBase, which it claims will show the spending, will only show what the public accounts show. A lump sum transfer will not show details.
In committee, we asked procurement and public services what the details were of the two-thirds of a billion dollars in vote 40. We asked what the money was going to be used for, what results they were hoping to achieve. We were told they were preparing a case to go to Treasury Board, and when they do they will have that information for us. Not now, not in advance, but once they know what they are going to spend it on they will get back to us.
I asked if they had the information now and I was told no.
We asked the procurement minister if she thought that Parliament should rubber-stamp $650 million of taxpayers' money without a plan on how to spend it. When we asked how she even came up with this total, we were told to check with Treasury Board Secretariat. Maybe the Treasury Board president could tell us how he came to that $650 million.
We asked about the $300 million for Phoenix and why there was no breakdown of spending details. I was told it would be presumptuous to put it in the departmental plan when the money had not even been approved by Parliament or by Treasury Board.
We are asked to pre-approve money in vote 40 with zero backup, yet we are told it is presumptuous to expect a budget or details. Imagine going to a bank and saying, “Give me a million-dollar loan.” The bank manager asks me what I want it for and I say I am not going to tell. I tell the manager to give me the money and let me spend it, but I will not say what I spent it on. However, I say I will provide a copy of the cancelled cheque to show it was spent.
It is no different with vote 40. We have repeatedly asked what the money is to be used for and the government tells us it does not know. How is this being accountable to taxpayers? How are we going to see what we are getting for the money? We do not know. Not one penny of that is in the departmental plans.
The government goes on and on about trying to provide safe drinking water on reserves. There is $100 million in vote 40, but it does not show up in the government's departmental plans. Not once does it show up as a target on how or what the government is going to achieve with that $100 million.
I asked someone in Treasury Board about the $300 million. I asked for a breakdown, because that money could be used for anything. What is stopping the government from spending that $300 million by providing a thousand dollar payout to every single employee as a reward for putting up with Phoenix? I was told nothing is to stop the government from doing that. The government is actually being sued by the public service. The gentleman from Treasury Board was intimating that perhaps that is what the money was going to be used for. Again we do not know what it is going to be used for.
We asked Privy Council officials about their spending and we were told they could not tell us the details because the money is not approved yet. They do not have a plan as to how that money will be spent. Who is the minister responsible for the Privy Council? It is the Prime Minister. This is a perfect example of what is going on with this department and what the plan is.
We have heard throughout the evening from Liberal members that the Parliamentary Budget Officer supports them. They say the previous Parliamentary Budget Officer supported them. Here is the truth. This is what Kevin Page, the former Parliamentary Budget Officer has to say about the vote 40 slush fund. He said that there was no way that this was an improvement. He did not say it could be okay, or maybe there was some good stuff about it. He said there was no way that this was an improvement.
The PBO says that because not one penny in the slush fund is in the departmental plans, so the estimates and the budget cannot be considered aligned.
The Treasury Board president is taking away accountability and transparency under the guise of making it easier for Canadians to understand because it is now aligned. However, here we have the Parliamentary Budget Officer, who he was happy to quote earlier supporting vote 40, telling us that the Treasury Board president's main reason for taking away accountability has not even achieved real alignment.
I want to finish with a final word from the Parliamentary Budget Officer. He said, “Over the past twenty years, the Executive Branch has gradually ceded additional support and control to Parliament.” Perhaps we could go 753 years back to the model Parliament, but Treasury Board vote 40 would represent an inflection point in this trend going the other way, where Parliament would now receive incomplete information and be able to exercise less control. He goes on to say that the main problem, as has been stated before by him and as said by the Treasury Board president, is not the alignment of the estimates; it is the government's inability to get their programs out the door.
He states in his review of the estimates process that parliamentarians have to decide whether it is worth it to allow the government to continue their incompetent way of getting the programs out the door and to allow them a blank check to spend $7.4 billion of taxpayers' money rather than getting their act together.