Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Mr. Chair, I'm going to address this through a practical analysis. I have four main points.
One, I support the Conservative Party's motion to commend front-line police officers and reject calls to promote the agendas of violent mobs. We can vote on it at any time you want, and I will support it. But that's not why we're here today. We're here today to decide whether we're going to undertake a study to examine all issues with respect to the G-8 and the G-20.
When I speak to my constituents, there are two main things they say to me. They ask why we spent $1.2 billion or more on this summit. We could have done so many different things with this money. We could have, for example, put the money into further economic incentives. Everybody knows that the April numbers came out, and GDP is zero, and that we're not out of this recession, despite what's been done so far by the government. With regard to EI changes, they tacked on some additional weeks for “good workers”. We could have done something else. Day care, tax cuts, education, health care—there are so many different things we could have done with $1.2 billion. Why did we not do those things instead?
The London, England, 2009 G-20 cost $30 million. Why did this cost $1.2 billion? It's a good question.
Next they ask me why, if you spent $1.2 billion at a minimum, it was such a mess. They want to find out exactly why this took place. Why was it in downtown Toronto? There had been a suggestion to use the CNE grounds. Why was that not accepted? The G-8 and the G-20 were divided between Huntsville and Toronto, which made no logical sense and drove up the costs. Why was that decision made?
You had a lot of waste. There were washrooms built in towns very far from the centre of Huntsville, for example, that nobody would ever use for the summit. That's not even logical. So they say let's examine this to determine why so much money was spent. Second, even under the circumstance that so much money was spent, why was it such a mess?
Now, I'm going to end there after this one brief point, because I don't want to go on and on. I don't have talking points that I'm going to read through.
We've had the experience in this committee of Conservative members filibustering, in essence, so that we wouldn't get to a vote, and we wouldn't get to make a decision. We have an hour left today. This is a special meeting. Canadians need to know. I would ask, please, that we get to a vote, that we make a decision as to whether we are having a study, and we start putting a nature to this rather than just reading talking points. If we don't get to a vote, and we don't make that decision, Canadians need to know. This has happened before, and there's been a continual Conservative filibuster to avoid making these decisions and getting to the actual crux of the matter.
Thank you.