Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to talk about Bill C-43, the Canada customs and revenue agency. I want to talk a bit about revenues and how they are applied and a bit about the agency. I also want to give a good example of application of revenues.
The government collects a lot of money and what it does with the money is important. I want to make a point about the difference between collecting money and spending it wisely.
I recently wrote a letter to the solicitor general about how the government spends those revenues. I want to relate a bit of that to the House. My concern was that the government has actually been cutting back on the services of the RCMP in British Columbia by way of budget cuts amounting to about $8.5 million. That does not seem like a lot of money, I suppose, in that the government takes in revenues of billions upon billions, $120 billion a year approximately, but it is a lot of money in British Columbia and it is a lot of money for the policing services.
Just recently members of the RCMP were advised that they had to eliminate their overtime and their training. They had to ground their airplanes. They had to stop running their boats. These are pretty basic functions for the RCMP in British Columbia.
The result of all this is that criminals have a free-for-all in some cases because the RCMP is not even available during the evening, after hours, to look at situations involving investigations of criminal activities in drugs. British Columbia has a serious drug problem.
With that in mind I wrote to the solicitor general and said that it was rather ironic that the government had to cut back $8.5 million in those operations but had a $3.5 billion surplus. Let us put this $3.5 billion into perspective. That is a three and a half thousand million dollar surplus, yet the RCMP has to cutback on its operations.
I said we should look at it again to see if there is anything the government is spending money on that is unnecessary and could have possibly been applied to the RCMP to help it continue to be efficient in its operations. It took me about 10 minutes. I want to relate how some of our revenues are being applied. For instance, we have a little bit of a debt of about $580 billion.