Mr. Speaker, I have come over to the government's side temporarily to offer my question today, because I think it is a common-sense, bipartisan question. I think that anybody on the Liberal side or the Conservative side of the House should be able to ask this sort of question and get a reasonable response.
I certainly did not want to be here tonight. I asked what I thought was a very reasonable question to my friend, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Health. She did not really answer it, and that is why I am here tonight. I am going to try asking it again, and I am going to beg her to answer it this time.
For folks following at home, I will explain that the Liberal government in the last Parliament spent $250 million on a program called PrescribeIT, with the laudable goal of making it easier for physicians, such as me, to send prescriptions to the pharmacy. I am from the Waterloo region and went to the University of Waterloo. A lot of my friends are tech entrepreneurs and founders. Many of them are senior software developers at this stage of our life. I have asked them how much money this sort of thing should cost. They have said maybe $1 million, and $5 million maximum. There is no way it should have cost $250 million.
The Liberals were spraying money from a firehose. It is incredible to spend a quarter of a billion dollars on something that should have cost 250 times less, but what is worse is that the program did not work. The Liberals know that it did not work, which is why they have cancelled it. After spending a quarter of a billion dollars of taxpayer money on something that did not work, they are cancelling it. The taxpayer is getting nothing.
I know that my friend, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Health, was not here in the last Parliament. She did not sign the contract. The Prime Minister also was not here. There is no blame in it for either of them, but as a country, as a Parliament, we need to get to the bottom of this. It is Parliament's sacred duty to protect the taxpayer's dollar, and 250 million is a lot of dollars, so we would like to see the contract.
We put forward a motion at the health committee to see the contract. The Government of Canada entered into that contract on behalf of the taxpayers and blew 250 million of their dollars. I think our bosses, the taxpayers, should get to see what the heck happened. My colleague, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Health, spent two hours of our time filibustering the motion so as to not produce the document.
The Prime Minister gave a speech today to reporters in which he said he does not like filibustering, and he criticized some Conservative members for speaking about “cats and dogs”. Does the Prime Minister know that the parliamentary secretary has been filibustering the document production order? Is he happy with that? Why is she doing it? Why will she not stop? Why will she not let the taxpayers see the contract so we can all stop this sort of waste and mismanagement from going forward in the future under the new government, as it likes to call itself?
I am sitting close to the parliamentary secretary and can see that she has prepared remarks. I am begging her to put them away and just answer this very simple question for taxpayers: Why will she not just let us, as Canadians, taxpayers and residents in an open society, see the contract, please?