I hear it is toast. It probably has not made enough money but I know it had $3.3 million given to it a few years ago and that was not enough of the taxpayers' money to keep it profitable perhaps so maybe we should have given it some more. I do not know how the bureaucrats are thinking these days.
We gave $46,000 of your taxpayer money to assist artists in the presentation of music in non-traditional spaces. We really have to wonder about the logic behind this kind of thinking. Why would they give any money at all in a grant like this one? The topic is so stupid it defies any kind of logical conclusion. Perhaps we should meld that with another interactive gesture and see what we think of it.
We know Hurtig Publishers gets lots of money, or had lots of money. I do not know about recently but I know in the past it has.
Under bilingualism there is grant after grant. I asked a question in the House in the last session about the $5,000 grant to the Canadian Kennel Club. This is very interesting. I received an answer that it is all right, that it is only $5,000. That is taxpayers' money. I got a letter from the Canadian Kennel Club and it was really unhappy with the question I asked because it felt it should have the money to support its bilingualism program of whatever it was.
In the letter it told me it had a budget of around $4 million. I wrote back to it and said: "Wait a minute here. If you have a budget of $4 million why do you need $5,000 of taxpayers' money? What is the purpose?"
The real idea is that most of these organizations if not all of them do not need the money. It is being made available by governments like this so that they can spend on it for whatever reason and much of it is very much unaccountable. Do we want to preserve the ideas of the government?
Do we want to support the government? It is like supporting that other government from Jurassic Park. That is what it is. If the government keeps spending money the way it is doing and blowing it out the door it too will join Jurassic Park just like its brothers.