"Not that many" he says. I am glad he asks how many. Let me bring them to the attention of the House. In the province of British Columbia water and sewer projects have been approved so far in the order of $493 million. That is not enough, says the Reformers; they said not many. In Alberta, a place familiar perhaps to one or two Reform MPs, it was $149 million.
We are only talking about water and sewer. We are not talking about roads, highways, engineering, non-residential gas and oil, equipment, dams and irrigation. We are only talking about those infrastructure projects.
In Saskatchewan it was $80 million; in Manitoba, $53 million; and in Ontario, $355 million again in the area of water and sewer. In Quebec it was $537 million; in New Brunswick, $89 million; and so on. I could go on and on with the numbers in this wonderful program promised by the Liberal Party in the red book and delivered for the benefit of all Canadians.
Those are grants under the infrastructure program for water and sewer of the kind the hon. member for Comox-Alberni is asking us to support. There is some dissension within the ranks of the Reform Party on this subject, particularly in the mind of the Reform Party member from Simcoe who denounced some weeks ago the infrastructure program. He said that it was a porkfest or something like that. Those were words he used.
However, not long before he had written a letter to the minister responsible for infrastructure, the President of the Treasury Board who does a fine job in this regard, by the way. This is the Reform MP from Simcoe who had previously denounced such projects as porkfests when they were in somebody else's riding. Now that they were in his riding he sent a letter asking for the government to support not one, not two, but three projects including the same kind of arena he denounced in somebody else's riding. That is only a coincidence. Yes, Reformers do that from time to time.