Elizabeth May: Mr. Speaker, audits, of course, are looking for the paperwork to match against the money that is spent. Certainly I can recall a recent audit in which the comment was, as in this case, “There is no evidence of wrongdoing, but we cannot find the paperwork and we cannot figure out exactly where the money was spent.”
Would the hon. member for Markham—Unionville contrast and compare the reaction of the Conservatives when fingers were pointed at much smaller amounts of money in the Attawapiskat community with the way they are sloughing this off as though nothing has happened when $3.1 billion cannot be tracked?
This is lousy attention to detailed paperwork and keeping track of money. The Conservatives were contemptuous when it was a small first nation community, but now they just say, “Look the other way; there is nothing here.”
John McCallum: Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from the Green Party for that excellent comparison. I think it is telling when the Conservatives bring in a third party administrator to deal with an impoverished, small aboriginal community, maybe dealing with, I do not know, hundreds of thousands of dollars, and then they slough it off when $3.1 billion goes missing under their watch.
I think this shows a certain tendency to take on small, poor communities with a vengeance and to simply ignore the problem of $3.1 billion going missing under their watch.