My father was an accountant and I vividly recall, because I was about eight years old, that he was the senior cashier for a large insurance company. During year-end, they could not find $1 million. He came home from work and said they could not find that $1 million. It was a matter of accounting to figure out where it went. I was a very little girl and I remember saying, “Keep looking in all the wastepaper baskets; it has got to be there somewhere”.

I find the misapprehension from Conservative members of the House today of what it means to have $3.1 billion missing to be quite like my reaction as a little girl, saying that the money is not really missing. They just cannot figure out where it is; it is not really missing money.

I think we understand that in an audit we have to track where the money is and where it was spent. That is why we have an Auditor General, to figure out that the government is taking good care and can account for every penny spent.

If $3.1 billion cannot be accounted for, will my friend from Nickel Belt agree with me that it means it is missing?

Claude Gravelle: Mr. Speaker, I completely agree with the member: the money is missing. All the Conservatives have to do is give the Auditor General the proper documentation so he can find where the money is. If he cannot find where the money is, then it is up to the Conservatives to tell us where they spent that money; $3.1 billion is a lot of coins to be missing.

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The thing that shocks me most about the budget is that I cannot find any tables that tell us, department by department, where the money will be spent. I have never in my life seen a budget that did not include the budget.

I wonder if my colleague has any comments.

Francis Scarpaleggia: Mr. Speaker, when I worked on my speech this the weekend, I looked furiously for some numbers and some comparative tables that would allow us to get some kind of an historical perspective on what was being done and noticed the exact same thing.

There seems to be an effort of subterfuge, to basically hide the realities of this budget in an historical context. I find that quite ironic. While the government is hiding what it is doing, it is spending large sums of money promoting itself and its supposed good works on television. Even a small portion of that advertising money could have been used to keep the ELA going, which is known as the best freshwater laboratory in the world. It is a travesty that it is being shut down.

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NDP committee members explained that they had found irregularities in government accounting for its funding in information from the Parliamentary Budget Office.  Goodyear stated that the accurate source is Public Accounts records, which show no irregularities.  He requested NDP committee members present apologize.

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