Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker, and thank you very much, honourable colleagues, for your comments, your thoughts.
Mr. Speaker, right off the bat, I am disappointed to hear from the honourable Minister of Infrastructure that this is not something that the government is in a position to support. I just want to be clear that to people who may be concerned about the potential cost of an audit like this: the resources of the Office of the Auditor General are independent of this government and this government's budgets, and indeed, the prerogative to even accept this motion, should it pass, would be up to the auditor general, as well. As an independent audit office, they are able to choose their own work and pursue their own reviews.
As some of the honourable Member mentioned, the value of a third-party audit really speaks for itself. We, as a standing committee, have reviewed several performance audits and, of course, the annual report on the government's public accounts, which we reported on earlier today. This is an opportunity to have an independent, fair, and transparent process that looks at all aspects of the project. The honourable Minister spoke that the Auditor General has reviewed the financial performance of the ITH project in the public accounts, but that's just an accounting exercise, a financial audit to make sure it meets accounting standards. It is not a performance audit.
The words spoken today in support of the motion were very clear that there are things we can learn from this project. While I have full confidence that the Minister and the department he represents in this House, and further, the contractors who are working on this project and our federal partners took this very seriously, and worked diligently to ensure it met all of the standards they laid out for in the agreement, having a third party verify those results just will further strengthen the case for transportation corridors. When the government is undertaking major transportation corridors in highly expensive regions of Canada, and asking the federal government to pay for them, why not have an independently verified audit of one of those projects to back up our business cases? This is not an attack on contractors, an attack on governments, or an attack on infrastructure projects. This is in support of those projects so we can find out the best practices for projects like these and ensure we can continue to deliver on projects like these.
So I don't agree with the Members who have spoken in opposition to this motion, saying it will reflect poorly on the people involved in this project. That's not what this is about, Mr. Speaker. This is about good value for money and best practices, and I believe that we will be able to achieve that better with a third-party independent review than with our own internal processes.
The strategic oversight committee the Minister spoke of, they are internal to government. They do not produce things that are publicly transmitted unless the Minister chooses to make them public. At this point, we've heard progress updates about the project. The highway, I might add, is closed today due to operational concerns, so people are asking questions. This is an attempt to resolve those questions and to show that the Minister's confidence in this project and that everything was done properly is, in fact, correct.
I urge everyone to support this, and I urge my colleagues across the aisle to change their minds on this. Mr. Speaker, this project was also initiated in the 17th Assembly, and a peculiar feature of our unique form of consensus government is we don't look backwards into the full range of operational details that previous Assemblies initiated, which is another reason this is calling for a special audit, to look into something that wasn't properly in the mandate or the responsibility of this 18th Assembly.
The Minister held a grand opening, and the project was substantially complete. There's enough there to start looking at it. Further, the motion does not call for an immediate audit. It calls for an audit when is practicable, as has also been pointed out, so to Members who were concerned that we are putting the cart before the horse, the motion clearly states that time should be taken until all the facts are known, and all the details can be produced by governments, to be reviewed by the auditor general.
Furthermore, why don't we just undertake it with our own committees, Mr. Speaker? Well, this project overlaps the mandates of two of our standing committees, and as a result, it would be very cumbersome to try to fit that into the standing committees' normal area of review. Furthermore, the scale of such an audit, or such a review, would stretch the resources of this Assembly, which should be properly focused on policy development, policy review, and legislative review, as well.
So, rather than take away from our own internal resources, we are calling on a third party that is independently funded to provide the kind of oversight that the project of this scale and this magnitude deserves.
Mr. Speaker, I just want to conclude by saying that the concerns that we have all heard as Members perhaps can be responded to by the Minister or by his staff or even by Members of this House. We just need that certainty that comes from an independent third party audit that will ensure we have the best possible facts, evidence, and best practices and good value for money so we can continue to build these projects to justify the investment or to make our investments more attractive to build critical transportation infrastructure from the federal government and continue to do our due diligence as legislators to work with the Office of the Auditor General and review these projects as they come forward.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. That concludes my comments in this debate. I would like to request a recorded vote. Thank you.