[Devils'Advocate]

Kevin Page has been rather neutered which is why he has been asking for more cooperation and openness. The Conservatives are vehemently against giving him more power to investigate any misuse of public funds. We just don't know what scandals are being covered up. If the Conservatives truly have the taxpayers best interests in mind, give Kevin Page the powers he is asking for. The Gomery Commission was supposed to clear Paul Martin of any wrongdoing, which it did, but that transparency showed the rot within the Liberal party. The Conservatives learned that transparency should be the first thing to go once you have power.

The funny thing is that under the Conservatives we have doubled the number of FIs (financial officers/auditors) to ensure that government departments don't misdirected funds. My job is being made increasingly more difficult as the Conservatives have hired Deloitte to do a financial pre-audit saying that we programmers should not have access to the production systems because I could give myself a pay raise and I know all the back doors to get it through the system without anybody noticing (at least not until someone does a year end audit and the budget numbers don't add up). Deloitte is recommending that we hire extra programmers and extra DBAs to handle production support that don't have access to those back doors so as to protect taxpayer dollars. The sponsorship scandal was $4,000,000 pilfered from taxpayers funds. Which is obviously not good. But it is tiny compared to the amount that government departments are paying each and every year avoiding another scandal. And that SHOULD be a scandal. It is an absolute embarrassment how much we are spending adding more and more red tape on top of an already bloated process.