Mr. Speaker, it is my pleasure to participate in the debate this evening and to perhaps wind up the debate and bring some perspective to the issue we are debating.
The role of the Auditor General is to be a watchdog. The Auditor General must be able to make an independent analysis about where the Government of Canada is not delivering high quality service or not spending taxpayer dollars in a responsible way and to the degree that Canadians rightfully deserve.
I want to begin with the fact that members of Parliament have been kept in the dark with respect to this Auditor General's report. I will speak to that aspect shortly. In general, our principal role here is to ensure that parliamentarians, the representatives of the people of Canada, have a hand on the tiller and are the protectors of the public purse. That, above all, is our responsibility to the taxpayer.
We look at the fact that the principal time where we have an opportunity to review the public purse is through the process of developing a budget and the main estimates themselves. I find it completely unacceptable and I believe essentially unprecedented for a modern democracy not to actually undergo the process of an annual budget.
Members are aware that we have had only two budgets over the period of four years. We all know that parliamentarians ratchet up their level of scrutiny come budget time when we review the estimates.
The fact that the former finance minister, the member for LaSalle—Émard, chose not to bring forth an annual budget in the normal fashion, which was each February, is the principal cause for the degree of runaway spending that has gone unchecked and where Parliament has been left in the dark.
We know we had an election in November 2000. We also know that in the spring of 2000 the Government of Canada asked for an extension to the long gun registry and spending through supplementary estimates. This was probably the same period of time when we should have had a budget but instead it was done through supplementary estimates.
If that request had been done under the full lens of a budget, I believe parliamentarians would have had a chance to scrutinize this unbelievable request for an expenditure where the Department of Justice asked for nearly $400 million in supplementary spending.
I will now touch on a few issues. First, I think parliamentarians have a right, an obligation and a moral responsibility to review spending on an annual basis. It was reckless and shameful for the former finance minister, the member for LaSalle—Émard, not to have performed his duty by bringing forth a budget for us to scrutinize in an appropriate way.
The following are the reasons that we are reviewing this particular issue. The Auditor General was concerned that with Parliament not informed, government wide management reforms risked losing momentum. She highlighted the issue of the long gun registry. She noted that Parliament had no opportunity to scrutinize the program costs, now estimated by the Department of Justice at more than $1 billion by the year 2004-05. This was because the department's performance report made no mention of increased costs and the additional spending was approved largely through supplementary estimates, rather than through main appropriations.
As she said in her press release, the issue was not gun control and not even the astronomical cost overruns. She said that although those were serious what was really inexcusable was that Parliament was left in the dark.
When we review our estimates we do not, by any means, do it at the same level of scrutiny as they do in provincial legislatures and not how we used to do it in this place. We approved government spending of $180 billion with one vote on a June evening without having a line by line review of the estimates done in this place, which is what Canadians expect us to do each and every year. That has really resulted in the misspending in programs.
Let us talk about the long gun registry. All Canadians believe in gun control. The Progressive Conservative Party believes in gun control. As a point of fact, we have registered handguns since the 1930s. We understand that safety provisions need to be in place. Firearms need to be stored separate from the ammunition and we need to have safe handling of firearms and ammunition.
Let us pretend for a moment that the registration of long guns was the right thing to do. It might have been the right thing to do at $2 million of estimated spending but it certainly is not at $1 billion. I find it shocking that government members have not even apologized or been remorseful of the fact that a program that was estimated to be $2 million has ballooned to $1 billion.
We have a moral responsibility to protect lives from a justice perspective, to make sure we actually invest our precious resources into fighting crime and into saving lives. I am more worried about biker gangs and organized crime than I am about registering the long guns of innocent deer hunters, duck hunters and farmers. Looking through that lens, I think most members of Parliament would concur.
The process essentially comes down to accountability. The fact is that we have not had an appropriate process to scrutinize expenditures. The Liberal Party of Canada is now on the verge of entering a sort of flashback to the 1970s. I would have hoped that the Prime Minister would have advised the new finance minister not to do what he did when he was finance minister, and that was not to have out of control spending.
Beyond health care, education and defence spending, program spending went up 7% across the board on issues that were not necessarily of immense priority with Canadians, beyond protecting human health and the environment. We now know that the government will actually balloon spending with a 25% increase in spending by the year 2008. This type of approach is simply not sustainable.
The only reason we are in fiscal health at the moment is largely due to the economic reforms brought forth in the later part of the 1980s and early 1990s by the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada, the government from 1984 to 1993, those principally being free trade where we moved our trade from about $90 billion to about $760 billion each and every year in two-way trade. That was an initiative by the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada.
The Liberal Party of Canada fought those initiatives and actually risked the financial well-being of our country through the positions it took in 1988 and again in 1993 on both of those trade initiatives. It fought us tooth and nail on initiatives such as privatization, deregulation, monetary policy and winning the war on inflation, all structural initiatives that were brought forth to strengthen our economy.
The result was that it was able to harvest the fruit of the labours of a government under the leadership of Brian Mulroney between 1984 and 1993.
The financial leadership in the country right now is non-existent. It is rudderless. There is free spending again. I have trepidation over the fact that we are not focusing our energies where we should be. First is to ensure that we have a health care system where the size of one's wallet does not determine the quality of health care that one receives. Second, we are not investing in post-secondary education where our best and brightest can seek higher learning and use that intellectual capital to drive our economy. Third, we do not have initiatives to strengthen our economy: we are not lowering taxes, paying down debt or getting our economic fundamentals in order.
The aimless budget, which was tabled just over a week ago, is testament of the fact that the Auditor General is very concerned about the fiscal management of the country. She rightfully has reason to be concerned, especially when this reckless budget was tabled on the heels of her report which questioned the government's financial management regime.