It seems to us at this committee that the government reporting so far has been long on propaganda and short on any meaningful information. There's no yardstick we can measure progress by. We have an unprecedented amount of money flying out the door at breakneck speed. We were concerned at the front end that there would be compromises in due diligence, etc., but we were willing to help you fast-track that money to get it out into the community. At the very least, we need to be able to measure whether or not it's having the desired effect.
Let's face it, this spending is driving us into a deficit situation of billions and billions and billions of dollars. I'm not going to get into the debate about where the money is being spent. I think a lot of NDP ridings actually fared fairly favourably from the spending, so I have no evidence that there's any hanky-panky going on in where the money went. We want to know, though, if the money was necessary.
You're checking to see that the journalists got that.