SUSAN LEBLANC: Speaker, my question is for the Minister of Finance and Treasury Board. The Auditor General’s budget request for increased funding for health audits was unanimously approved at a recent committee meeting. The idea of additional health auditors actually comes from this government’s election platform and the Health and Wellness Minister’s own mandate letter, but despite this committee’s approval, it is inexplicably missing from the budget. Can the minister explain why this election promise and mandate is going unfulfilled?
HON. ALLAN MACMASTER: Speaker, it’s not missing from the budget, and it’s not missing as a platform commitment unfulfilled either. The commitment has been fulfilled. We created this extra resource capacity for the Auditor General because we believe in the importance of auditing what’s happening in health care, because we want to see continuous improvement. We see the Auditor General’s Office as playing a role in that. We actually stuck to what we committed to in our election platform, and that office is now staffed as we had committed to in our election campaign.
SUSAN LEBLANC: The Auditor General was approved by the special committee for $1.1 million and received $200,000 extra this year. Last year, she asked for extra money and she got not nearly what she asked for. This is unreal, in the face of this government yesterday tabling a budget that again allocated its bulk of spending toward health care at a whopping $7.3 billion. (Applause) Yes, yes. Great, great. With this level of investment, and in the midst of the scandal that is the Hogan Court health hotel, it’s more important than ever to have the independent eyes of the Auditor General to ensure that the government is accountable and transparent in their health care spending. My question to the minister: If the minister believes his government’s spending is all above-board, why won’t he provide the funds to the Auditor General that she asks for?
ALLAN MACMASTER: No other government before has provided these resources to the Auditor General’s Office. That’s a fact. Nobody did it before. We’re open to doing it. We did it. We did what we said we would do in the election campaign. There are a lot of asks -believe me. We had well over another billion dollars of spending asks that we could have said yes to, but we said yes to a lot of things in the budget yesterday. One of them was further increases in the health budget, because that is our focus as a government, and there was something new: There was tax relief for Nova Scotians.