Madam Speaker, it has been a delight to listen to some of this rather curious debate.
This is either the last day of the Reform Party or the first day of the Canadian Alliance, however one wants to cut it.
When we talk about the budget and saving money, I have a couple of questions to put forward in a rhetorical sense and members opposite can decide whether they wish to respond.
I would like to know, for example, if the former leader of the Reform/Canadian Alliance Party is sleeping in Stornoway tonight. I am not trying to be difficult. I would not want to see that man and his lovely wife out on the streets of Ottawa. Lord knows, we have a homeless problem and we do not want to exacerbate it. Is the moving van in the driveway and is the new leader of the Canadian Alliance moving in? Maybe they are all going to bunk together and have a pyjama party. That is a possibility.
There is another question which has not been addressed, which impacts on the fiscal responsibility of the government and opposition parties. Who has been paying the salary of the individual who is the immediate past leader of the Reform Party? Who has been paying the salary, which is not only an MP's salary but is also a salary that is afforded the Leader of the Opposition, along with a limousine, which of course he was not going to use? We remember that. With the limousine there is a chauffeur. That is why they call them limos, I am told.
Who has been paying for all that for the past three months as that individual travelled the nation to sell his vision of a new united alternative? In all fairness, the party which stands in this place and purports to hold the feet of the government to the fire on fiscal and financial matters should be responsible enough to tally up the bill for living in Stornoway, that illustrious bingo hall down the road, and for using the limousine for the past three months while the member openly campaigned from sea to sea to sea for his own purposes, to further his own career.
What about all the staff time? Was his staff working in the leader's office, concentrating on the business of parliament, of a member of parliament or of the Leader of the Opposition? Or, were they in some surreptitious manner helping this individual to sell his so-called vision?
I wish that one day we could turn the tables and have someone from this side of the House ask a question of the Leader of the Opposition. I would like to ask him to explain what I suspect would be hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars spent on campaigning to bury the old Reform Party and somehow launch the new.