Statement made on 24 November 2011 by Senator James Cowan
Hon. James S. Cowan (Leader of the Opposition):
Honourable senators, my question is for the Leader of the Government in the Senate. In 2006, the minister will recall that her government was elected on a platform of accountability and transparency and made a great deal of holding others to a high standard of accountability. One would have expected that her government would have held itself to that same level of accountability and transparency that it was demanding of others.
On Tuesday, interim Auditor General John Wiersema tabled his quarterly report in Parliament in which he audited the performance of the $47-billion Economic Action Plan. He looked closely at $7-billion worth of investments that went into approximately 6,000 infrastructure projects across Canada. He came to the conclusion that the program had done a poor job of reporting on job creation and the success of its results.
In fact, he noted that the program was designed in a way that "did not allow for performance measurement and reporting against this key objective." The key objective, of course, was job creation.
Can the leader tell us why her government designed a program in such a way that it would be difficult for Canadians to find out with certainty how many jobs were created in the expenditure of $47 billion of their money?
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