Madam Speaker, I appreciate working with the member on the health committee, and the motion is something that the NDP is supporting. We believe in getting to the bottom of the SDTC spending scandal. It is important to have transparency. It is important to know how taxpayers' money was spent.
I want to flag, and the member has flagged as well, the important work of the Auditor General and the Parliamentary Budgetary Officer, independent officers of Parliament. They get the straight goods to Canadians. This is vitally important. We can never forget this, but it was forgotten during almost a dismal decade during the Harper regime, where the Harper Conservatives basically slashed funding to the Auditor General, funding to the PBO and funding to independent officers of Parliament.
We know why. It is because the Harper Conservatives, unlike now when we are getting to the bottom of things, did not want the Canadian public to actually know about their spending scandal. My colleague talked about the money involved here with the SDTC as being a lot of money, but it pales in comparison to what the Harper regime misspent. I will flag just a certain number of figures: the anti-terrorism funding, no paper trail, $3.1 billion; Phoenix pay system, $2.2 billion; the F-35 procurement scandal, billions; the G8 misspending, a billion; the ETS scandal, $400 million. I could go on.
Why do Conservatives say, “Do as we say, not as we do”?