Senator Marshall: Thank you, Senator Lankin, for that question. I’ll start by saying that the spending documents are, in my opinion, very confusing because there are so many of them. There was a very interesting podcast done by the Parliamentary Budget Officer talking about how the spending rolls out throughout the year, and he said it’s a mess.

There has been a recognition. I don’t know how far back the recognition goes with regard to the problems with tracking the line items and figuring out what is happening, but it was before my time.

When Scott Brison was the minister responsible for the Treasury Board, he started an initiative to try to improve the process whereby government funding got approved and access to information is provided and so on. For two years, they tried different things. One year, they used different votes, and I found that, while they weren’t perfect, those two years were very helpful with the changes that were made.

After he left, there was nothing done. For a couple of years after that, each year I would ask the minister responsible for the Treasury Board if they were going to restart that initiative. I thought it would be very helpful. There is just no inclination to tackle it. People are really on their own. I’m a professional accountant, and I audited the books of the Province of Newfoundland, but it took me a couple of years to figure out what was happening federally.

We get new members on the Finance Committee. They must be absolutely confused, because the spending is very fragmented. When you sit down to look at the spending, you have five documents. You’re going from document to document. It’s true, as you say, that in some cases we get detailed information. In other cases, it’s quite large sums of money. We don’t always get good answers from officials who are testifying. You have to sort through the numbers yourself. My staff download a lot of the data, and we interrogate the data, stratify it and try to figure it out that way.

Thank you for your question.

Senator Marshall: The government cherry-picks the statistics that make them look better. But you have to look at other statistics too, and what concerns me is the amount of money that is going into debt repayment. It’s now one of our biggest spending programs, and the debt is growing at an alarming rate. This is the reason I’ve decided that I’m not going to support any more spending bills by the government because, in my opinion, they have lost control. Everything is on this very upward trend — quite a steep trend.

They cherry-pick certain things that they rely on, but you have to remember that the debt of the government has doubled since this government came to power. Up to a couple of years ago, they were borrowing and saying that interest is low and they can’t afford not to borrow. That’s what they said. However, it’s a risk. Now interest rates have gone up, and now interest is 10% of government expenditures. It’s a big program. There is no curtailing of the expenditures. They just keep spending, and the debt keeps increasing.

I looked at the budget yesterday. We’re going to borrow another $63 billion this year, interest is going to go up further, and there seems to be no initiative to look at the revenue side — other than to increase taxes. Taxes on corporations have gone up quite a bit, but personal income tax has also gone up. For people who owe the government money — there are those offshore accounts that Senator Downe is always talking about. There’s the tax gap — the underground economy. It seems like there is no initiative on the government’s part to get in there and do something. The Canada Revenue Agency is leaving the impression that they are doing nothing or next to nothing, even though they received billions of dollars since 2015 to improve the collection of taxes.

I’m very concerned because the debt is just being added to. There is no debt being paid down. Most people in this chamber are older. This is what we’re going to leave our children. We’re going to leave our children all that debt. We look at the Canada child benefit — which is a great program — and the child care program, but the money is going to help those children now, and they are going to be the ones who will have to pay it back and also pay the debt servicing cost.

Government likes to cherry-pick what shows them in a favourable light, but I think, as legislators, we have to look at the whole package.

I will leave it at that.

Senator D. Patterson: I was also shocked but not surprised at the information you gave — the shocking information that 65% of COVID payments, if I understood you correctly, were deemed ineligible. I remember talking in this chamber about how every person in the men’s shelter in my community was able to get the Canada Emergency Response Benefit, or CERB, payments without having to prove the $5,000 income that was required by the program. Many folks in jail got CERB payments as well. So I’m not surprised by the information you have given us.

You hear from ministers and officials. I’m wondering if you think there have been lessons learned about this approach of having testimonial applications for government programs. Is there any sign that this practice will be corrected in the future?