Mr. Speaker, I listened very attentively to the hon. member and have come to the conclusion that Reform Party politics has no artistic value.
The member across said that he prefers to see the purchase of art for cash rather than tax cuts. That was in his first or second line. Let us calculate that mathematically. The hon. member for Durham is an expert with numbers and so are a couple of other members of the Liberal caucus who are accountants. They know these things far better than I.
If you start off with the proposition that a work of art valued at $1,000 gives you a credit for 50 per cent of the value, which is $500 and you are in the 50 per cent tax bracket which is $250, it costs the government $250 to get a $1,000 item.
He prefers to pay $1,000 rather than $250. I think that is Reform math. I want no part of it and I do not think Canadians do either.
The art critic for the Reform Party wanted to tell us that a particular work of art at the national gallery in his view was ridiculous or that he did not like it. That may be so. I do not pretend to understand everything in a museum of modern art any place, not just this place. I have been to the centre Georges Pompidou. I do not understand some objects there either. However, that is neither here nor there.
The issue is whether the museum should have bought that work of art. I do not even know if the member across knows who owns the work of art in question. He assumes everything in there belonged to the Canadian public through our tax system. That is not necessarily how it was acquired. It does not necessarily belong to the museum. It could belong to another museum but here on a travelling exhibition.
I ask the member to take a little more time to go to the museum-this or any other one-speak to the curator and others and learn a little about how these things work.
I have never seen the object in question. Perhaps I would not like it either, which is a different issue. I do not even know who owns the item in question. Judging from the comments of the member in his speech I would bet a dollar to a penny he has not asked the curator of the museum who owns the piece in question.