Thank you. I'm thinking three steps ahead and losing my current step.
There was a government-wide austerity program. Much to my chagrin—to tell you the truth—the Auditor General of the day said that they could live with those cuts because they saw themselves as being team players. They recognized that the government got elected with a mandate and that mandate was being carried out. Remember that they don't play politics. They follow the government, whomever the people decide will be that government. At the time, they felt that they could manage within the reduction and—here's the key thing, colleagues—not affect the work they do for Parliament. For us, that work is performance audits. It used to be called value-for-dollar audits.
I was raring for a good fight. Like today, I thought, “You're cutting the Auditor General?” What was I going to do, though? The Auditor General said they could do it. It's a non-partisan committee and if the AG says they can do it, then fair enough. They did it. We were not impacted by it.
This is the first time in Canadian history that the Auditor General has told Parliament that the executive branch is not giving them sufficient money to carry out their audit plan for the year ahead. As my colleague just said, they had to cancel them. Two of them were the ones that I mentioned. This has never happened before.
These are my last days here and I don't have to worry about getting elected. I have to tell you that I'm shocked it's you guys—the Libs. For one thing, it's the antithesis of what you talk about and what you ran on—accountability, transparency and service. A lot of my constituents bought into that argument because it's the kind of thing they want from government.
In the absence of an overall austerity program—which doesn't legitimize it, but at least provides an understandable context—there can only be two motivating reasons that I can think of. One is retaliation because we still have a funding mechanism where the very people the Auditor General audits also decide how much money they get. We just had an e-commerce report that didn't make the government look so good. They're the very people that the Auditor General had to sit down and negotiate with and they're the very people, for the first time in the history of Canada, who have said “no”. They recommended it up through the ministers and it's the ministers at the end of the day.
Don't kid yourself. We've all been around long enough. Staff reports matter. Staff recommendations matter. They got slammed by the Auditor General in that e-commerce report, yet they're the very same people they had to go to, cap in hand, to ask for funding—only this time they said “no”.
It's either retaliation—which would be unacceptable—or the government really is hiding from things like the cybersecurity report because they know what the last report said, and perhaps, I would assume, they know how much has been done or not done. There would also be people in government who would be very aware of what our threat level is, and whether it's improved in the last 10 years.
If you have enough arrogance to believe you're going to be the government when that report comes out, a sharp political move—unacceptable from an ethical point of view—that a good autocrat would act on is to make sure that audit doesn't happen. The thinking is that the price of taking the heat for not providing adequate funding for the first time in Canadian history is less than the criticism they would get when that report comes out.
I have to say, I'm just perplexed as much as anything. If it was perhaps another party in power that had a different view of accountability and transparency, that might help me understand the context. For the life of me, I can't understand. Well, I haven't yet had a chance to hear from colleagues officially, so I won't speculate until I hear what they have to say on the record on this issue.
This is big. I can remember Tyler and I sitting up at night trying to figure out how we could force the government to give us one particular piece of information that we needed in a key hearing. I would just get myself so wrapped up and concerned that we needed that information.
Parliament is entitled to that information. Parliament needs that information. As I remind people a lot, Parliament is supreme—not the government. Parliament decides who government is. Parliament decides who the prime minister is. Parliament decides when the prime minister and the government get fired.