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However, relative to collecting on tax debt, I was prompted by the member’s comments about cutting back on staff at CRA. I am wondering if he is familiar with the train of reports we have had since 2006 from the auditor general pointing out that the CRA seemed to have a very poor understanding of where the tax debt was and why it was rising. It was failing to use its risk assessment models properly. The auditor general, for years, has found that CRA staff tends to go after smaller debts, harassing what I think of as regular folks, and leaving aside the millionaires. The large, low-hanging fruit is with the millionaires. Does the hon. member have any comments on the pattern of CRA tax collection?

Peter Julian: Mr. Speaker, that is really one of the major points I hoped to bring forward tonight. That is why the Conservatives have wanted to shut down debate. This is the 44th time now they have invoked closure. They always have another excuse. Tonight it was because people support the bill itself. I guess beyond that, what they are actually saying is they hope that no one brings forward their shoddy record on uncollected tax debt and allowing these tax havens. Of course, even though we are operating under closure, we have no hesitation in bringing forward the shoddy record of the Conservatives.

The reality is, as I pointed out and as was pointed out in the auditor general’s report, the $10 million debts are the ones the Conservatives just seem to let go by, but they go after individual taxpayers to pay their fair share and catch up on monies they owe to Revenue Canada.

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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.

The post Opposition Motion – 2013 Spring Report of the Auditor General of Canada appeared first on Elizabeth May.

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.

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That summary of what the Auditor General found is quite astonishing. It is a much larger amount of money that is missing, although the Conservatives, we know, will say, as they have in question period, that the Auditor General did not say there had been any wrongdoing. Obviously, the Auditor General cannot figure out where the money has gone. It is going to be a difficult forensic exercise.

I wonder if the hon. member would comment on whether he believes that the motion from the official opposition will allow us to get to the bottom of the matter.

Mathieu Ravignat: Mr. Speaker, indeed, it is a forensic exercise, and that is why our motion proposes access to information that would allow us, as parliamentarians, to find out what happened to this $3.1 billion in missing money. It is a scandal. It is incredible that the President of the Treasury Board is absolutely incapable of saying what happened or of even indicating what might have happened. That is worrisome. The responsibility of a government is first, to take care of taxpayers’ money, and this is a clear violation of that pact with the Canadian people.

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The Green Party is the only truly global party, with Greens in 70 countries and elected Members of Parliament in Europe, Latin America, Australia, and New Zealand. Together we work to press the nuclear super-powers to meet their obligations for disarmament, to reduce and eliminate the nuclear threat. We work to shift military budgets to peacekeeping and peace-building. We work to ensure the education, health protection and economic autonomy of women and girls around the world to address poverty and over-population.

Greens see the world as a planetary whole. We believe the essence of a strong security policy starts with addressing the single largest security threat to modern civilizations the climate crisis. As Gwynne Dyer pointed out in his book, Climate Wars, military establishments around the world are aware that the threat of increased political destabilization due to increased severity and frequency of severe climatic events warrants treating climate as a security threat. The spectre of millions of environmental refugees is a real and near-term reality, if we do not move aggressively to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Honouring binding multilateral treaties, such as the Kyoto Protocol, is a measure of a nation’s reliability and integrity in the world. As the only nation to have ratified and then repudiated Kyoto, we have blotted our copy book in the community of nations. Our domestic fossil-fuel expansionist policies put us at odds with the International Energy Agency, the European Union, and more.

Meanwhile, addressing global disparities, working together as nation-states to improve the standard of living for all, is more than a free market issue. It requires equity, the rule of law, and enhanced global governance.

Defence policy needs to be nested in the context of how we see our role in the world. Increasingly, Prime Minister Stephen Harper appears to defining our role in two ways trade and military hardware.

We are entering into cookie-cutter trade agreements with small (and in some cases corrupt) economies. Jordan, Panama, Colombia, with China yet to come. Our international posture is one of unquestioning support for Israel (I support the existence of the state of Israel, but think unquestioning cheer-leading is a disservice to peace in the region), and joining NATO missions with zeal.

Meanwhile, we are sending the signal that diplomacy is a dwindling concern. For some time, the Harper Conservatives have been shrinking our embassy presence so that a Canadian in trouble in Nicaragua, for example, is told the closest Canadian presence is in Guatemala and in any event, your phone call is directed to a 1-800 emergency line in Ottawa. With the 2012 budget, we are selling off diplomatic residences a decision surely to be rated penny wise and pound foolish by successor governments.

The most high-profile domestic defence question is clearly the botched procurement process for the F-35s. In many ways the F-35 fighter jet is the perfect object lesson from former U.S. President and former General Dwight Eisenhower’s warning to beware of the “military-industrial complex.” Canada’s rationale for joining in the process in 1997 had little, if anything, to do with domestic security and everything to do with hoped-for aerospace contracts.

Under Liberal prime ministers Chrétien and Martin, Canada put up initial funds to participate (first $10-million in 1997 and then a further $150-million in 2001). Up until this point, the auditor general found no fault with the process and accountability of decision-making. It was beyond the scope of the auditor general’s report to investigate whether Canada needed the F35s. Just as it was beyond the auditor general’s responsibility to find out which of the political masters were aware of the various and repeated acts of incompetence and failures of due diligence he went on to report.

The auditor general recounted such a trail of violations in the fundamentals of normal procurement process that even seasoned Ottawa-watchers are stunned. The decisions were generally taken in reverse order. First came the decision, followed by inventing criteria to justify the decisions, and then, lastly the rationale. Not one, but two, departments were found to have failed in the exercise of basic due diligence. Both the Department of National Defence (DND) and the Department of Public Works and Government Services Canada (Public Works) were found to have fallen below the standard of due diligence. 

The essence of the AG report is not, as Defence Minister Peter MacKay now claims, that the AG found a novel way to add up the costs of the jets. The essence of the report is that Canadians were lied tofor years. Parliament was misled for years. And the whole F-35 project, from 2006 onwards, was typified by a litany of rogue decision-making. What we need to know is how it happened that two departments suspended judgment, cut corners, and violated process. One theory is that Public Works and DND were independently willing to abandon normal procurement rules. More likely, the orders came from the one in control of all departments the Prime Minister who wants to remake us as a warrior nation.

Green Party Leader Elizabeth May represents Saanich-Gulf Islands, B.C.
Originally printed in the Hill Times.

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On the costs I wrote:

Like many military contracts in the US, the costs of the F-35 have spiralled and are way over budget.  In March 2010, U.S. Defence Secretary Robert Gates told the Congress that it was “unacceptable” that the F-35 is 50% over-budget.  Costs of developing the new fighter jets is approaching $300 billion. With bureaucratic baffle-gab that takes your breath away, the Pentagon critique of the fighter jet programme concluded: “affordability is no longer embraced as a core pillar.”

On the question of whether the F35s met Canadian defence needs:

Peter MacKay enthused about the jets.  Lockheed Martin’s F-35 jets are exciting new toys.  They are so exciting that our government did not hold an open contracting process.  We only wanted these planes. They can take off and land on aircraft carriers. They have stealth coating.  They can engage in air to air combat and rely on mid-air re-fueling.  ….  We don’t have aircraft carriers.  We have no plausible security scenario in which air to air combat is anticipated.  (The Battle of Britain was a long time ago.) And stealth coating?  Are we planning a surprise invasion? 

True, our aging CF-18s need to be replaced.  Our large geography has always led to a priority choice for two-engine planes, so if a plane is in a remote spot and loses an engine, the pilot can get to a safe place to land.  The F-35s are single engine planes.  Asked what will happen if the engine fails, Peter MacKay replied “it won’t.” We need planes for search and rescue.  The F-35 is not appropriate for search and rescue.

My column concluded:

So, it seems Canada is spending money we don’t have for planes we don’t need. And it seems we are doing this to hold our place in some macho military solidarity with the Pentagon. The opportunity costs of $16 billion for fighter jets is enormous  — in lost opportunities to reduce poverty, create jobs, protect health care and fight climate change.  None of this has been debated or discussed in the House.  And it was not in the 2010 budget.   I will work with other parties to reverse this sale and direct priorities to those Canadians value.

So, I was still using the Harper $16 billion estimate.  But when the Parliamentary Budget Officer explained that those costs were off by about $10 billion or so, I believed him.  Stephen Harper attacked him.

The point is that not even willful blindness of the most acute variety can be pleaded by the Prime Minister in his attack on the Parliamentary Budget Officer.  If I knew the planes were being chosen without criteria or a proper open bidding process, that the whole project was a boondoggle and that Canada was going to be spending $25 billion on planes we did not need, so too did everyone else.

The Auditor General’s report should be required reading for every voter who thought Stephen Harper had the qualities of a wise manager of the public purse.

The post F-35s appeared first on Elizabeth May.

On Tuesday (February 14^th), the Committee heard testimony from the Department of Citizenship and Immigration (CIC) and the Canadian Boarder Services Agency (CBSA) on the current use of biometrics technology on refugee claimants and temporary foreign worker visa applicants as well as the proposed use of electronic travel authority (ETA) forms to prevent inadmissible individuals from reaching Canada.

On Thursday (February 16^th), the Committee heard testimony from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), the Office of the Auditor-General of Canada, and the Privacy Commissioner of Ontario. The Committee examined the privacy concerns involved with the use of biometrics technology, the potential problems of sharing the data collected with Canada’s allies (especially the United States), the current gaps and inefficiencies in the processing of visa applications, and the problems involved with the processing of refugee claimants including their detention and removal.

Minister Jason Kenny also introduced Bill C-31 in the House of Commons on Wednesday (February 15^th), a bill which will allow the minister to select ‘safe’ countries from which to accept refugees and confirms the implementation of biometrics technology in the tracking of refugee claimants.

In the following weeks, the Committee will continue to assess the use of biometrics technology and the ways in which Canada’s immigration system can be made more secure.

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The background that led to the CBC transparency project was obvious. In May 2009, Auditor General Sheila Fraser got in a tussle with a little known group called the ‘Board of Internal Economy.’ This committee of the House of Commons oversees over $140 million of public monies used for MP expenses for things such as travel, entertainment, staff and housing. The Board is made up of the House leaders for each party, the Speaker of the House and a few others. Fraser wanted to look at the books of the reimbursed expenses for MPs. The Board said ‘no.’

In the wake of the UK scandal in which MPs had taxpayers reimburse them for outlandish personal expenses, including the cleaning of one MP’s castle moat, Canadians might want to look at the details.

The Nova Scotia government opened their records and criminal charges were laid. One MP had the gall to claim the installation of a back-up diesel generator at his home was really for the seniors home down the road. I could see no valid reason for refusing to open the books before I became an MP. Certainly, once elected, I was quick to agree to the CBC challenge.

I assumed that a goodly number of other MPs would also agree to posting all expenses. I was somewhat shocked when the CBC (and Radio Canada) TV crews showed up to interview me about the project and asked me how I felt about being the only MP to agree. My surprise turned to discomfort as they explained how former Liberal MP Michelle Simson was shunned by her colleagues when she started posting her expenses on her website. (She was not re-elected, but does not believe that was due to her campaign for transparency.)

In defence of the other 307 MPs who refused the offer to make their expenses public, my hunch is that they would have agreed, had their party hierarchy not insisted that every last one of them refuse. The solidarity between the Conservatives, NDP, Liberals and the Bloc is solid. The parties do not want anyone looking behind the totals for the details.

The general categories of expenses are published. Individual members’ expenditures are reported and published by Public Accounts (see below). Every MP’s expenses are broken down for staffing, travel within the riding, advertising (not related to campaigns), costs of printing and mailing out MP newsletters.

To understand the level of detail, I will use an example. In 2007-08, our previous MP spent over $21,000 for travel within the riding. That is clear and reported. What we cannot know is the break down: how much on ferries? Personal car? Float planes? Et cetera.

Each MP has a barebones budget of approximately $28,000/mo, on top of the basic annual salary of $158,000. That amount must cover the costs of the constituency office (rent and operations), staffing in the office in Ottawa and in the constituency, printing, mailing, advertising, travel within the riding, and assorted other activities. (I find I am already really stretching that budget! I need to provide a lot of help to constituents and track every issue on the Hill, so I am relying on volunteers and interns a great deal).

Once an MP is asked to perform additional duties (chairing committees, party whip, parliamentary secretary or minister), additional amounts are added to their salaries and resources. Once an MP is a Minister of the Crown, there are additional budgets for travel and expenses.

Completely outside the reported expenses is the system for MP travel to and from Ottawa and the riding. This comes to an additional over $25 million/year. The travel budget is an art form all its own. It is called a point system. Each MP receives 64 points. Each ‘point’ is a round trip journey from home to Ottawa or some other location within Canada for which MP work requires travel). The trips are booked by the government travel agent and are on Air Canada.

I wondered if Air Canada provided some sort of government discount. No. Any MP ticket is paid by taxpayers to Air Canada at the going rate. MPs are entitled to fly Business Class.

I decided early on that I would stick with flying economy to save money. The odd thing is, due to the fact that the system is outside my office budget and on points, when I fly less and fly economy, my office budget does not benefit from money saved. The government coffers benefit.

I asked the travel agent to tell me how much I would cost the taxpayers in travel for a year (assuming 15 round trips—this includes any staff travel or ‘designated traveller’—a spouse or family member). The total, travelling economy, comes to $12,000.

Then I asked what it would have cost if I flew Business Class. It would cost $79,000. And that’s only for 15 trips out of a possible 64 allowed.

Of course, I am also motivated by reducing my carbon footprint. I will always struggle between wanting to be home for important events, even if it means flying on a Friday and returning on a Sunday, versus cost and carbon. My office is also budgeting to buy carbon offsets.

I hope I will not be the only MP providing full disclosure of expenses for long. I hope other MPs will join me and that together we can force openness from the Board of Internal Economy. For now, I am hoping that people who asked ‘what can one Green MP do?’ will think this is a good thing.

For more information on MP expenses go to:

http://parl.gc.ca/information/about/process/housegeneralinformation/membersexpenses

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“The Harper government was clearly not diligent or transparent with public funds. The lack of control is reminiscent of the sponsorship scandal,” said Green Leader Elizabeth May.  “It is very troubling. Where is the accountability?”

Among the most troubling figures is that Conservative MP Tony Clement’s riding received a hefty reward of $50 million dollars, ten times more than previous summit hosts.  Mr. Clement has now been appointed President of the Treasury Board Secretariat, in charge of preventing wasteful government spending.  “This whole situation does not give Canadians much faith in our government’s ability to properly manage public monies,” said May.

Greens also want to ensure that the financial scandal is not the only issue receiving attention.  The G20-G8 still requires an inquiry into the abuse of civil liberties. “We must not allow the abuses to be swept under the carpet. We need a full inquiry into the chain of command, the routine Charter violations, how people (some pulled off commuter rail even before reaching Toronto) were left in inadequate jails without access to legal counsel or a chance to call family, for 24 hours. Protecting our rights as a country requires getting to the bottom of what happened,” said May.

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