We’ve all been very mistaken, apparently.

Over the last week, ever since the Auditor General’s Office released its spring report and revealed that $3.1 billion in potential anti-terror and public safety spending had not been accounted for, a lot of people in Ottawa have been asking what might have happened to it — and why the government can’t seem to track it down.

It turns out we should have been asking the Opposition. Or, rather, the Opposition should have been asking the government for that specific information every year between 2001 and 2010. At least, that’s according to the president of the Treasury Board, Tony Clement.

Under fire once again in question period Monday, Clement offered up what has been the government’s fallback position on the matter: quoting the auditor general stating that his office had found nothing that suggested the money was used in any way it should not have been. That is to say, it probably wasn’t stolen or somehow misappropriated, as far as the AG can tell.

“The anti-terrorism fund that he was reviewing was purely an internal government reporting process and that the shortcomings, which we acknowledge, did not prevent parliamentarians or Canadians from scrutinizing spending through the estimates process and through the public accounts process,” Clement said. “Those are the facts.”

A moment later — still under questioning from New Democrat MP Lysane Blanchette-Lamothe, who wanted to know whether the government had any evidence of how that money was spent, or whether they’d truly lost $3.1 billion — Clement reverted once again to an answer from last week.

“The answers to the honourable member’s questions are found in the public accounts and the estimates,” Clement began, “in the years 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009. Those were tabled before this chamber, they were debated by parliamentarians. Either her or her predecessor took part in those debates.”

Indeed, the public accounts were debated and approved in each of those years. However, as the AG’s office told Maclean’s last week, the information in the public accounts was “at an aggregate level and most of the PSAT spending was not separately reported as a distinct (or separate) line item.” So, yes, the money was probably spent somewhere in those years, but darned if anyone would be able to find it.

As it turns out, the NDP looked.

“We went and checked all the public accounts from 2001 to 2010 and the words ‘public security and anti-terrorism’ do not appear anywhere,” NDP House leader Nathan Cullen said a few minutes later.

That likely means the NDP downloaded the public accounts, control-F searched the documents for those terms and found nothing. As they would. Surely wherever the money was spent, it was not labeled as such. That’s exactly the problem. But with the point duly made, the floor was handed back to Clement.

“The member knows, or should know, that each department, every year, must table in its public accounts each item of spending in the public accounts. That is legally obligated. That is what each department does,” Clement said.

“If the honourable member wants to play word games he can do so, but the facts are there for parliamentarians,” Clement went on, finding fun in the NDP’s terminology search. “If his caucus members from the years from 2001 to 2009 did not ask the right questions then that is their problem, not the problem on this side of the House.”

The New Democrats laughed.

In its report, the OAG said (under the heading: “Information on whether departments used $3.1 billion in Initiative funding was not available”) that when it asked the Treasury Board Secretariat for information on what happened when departments reallocated those anti-terror initiative funds, “we were informed that discussions took place between the departments and agencies and the Secretariat as part of the normal program challenge function.” However, the report adds, “financial information on reallocations was not captured.”

But this is not the problem, apparently. No. It is not an accounting problem. It is a problem of discussion. According to the president of the Treasury Board – the man whose job it is to head up “the development and implementation of a cross-government spending review” – we are in the dark as to how $3.1 billion was spent simply because the Opposition wasn’t asking specific questions for ten years about where that money was going.

Likely, if they’re still wondering which years Clement is talking about, surely he would be again prepared to list them. That much accounting, he can do.