Mr. Speaker, I would like to clarify that. What I was referring to was the fact that the guidelines for that grant program were not adhered to. That is what I meant.
It is rather ironic that the member for Mississauga South would raise this point of order with you, Mr. Speaker, given the fact that he is remarkably silent when it comes to advocating and demonstrating any support for families, despite the fact that he pretends to be an advocate of family values. However, when the measure of that is put to the test, he fails repeatedly. I am referring to the fact that he continues to support the Liberal agenda, the anti-family agenda of overtaxing families, of unfair taxation, of refusing to defend the definition of marriage, and the list goes on.
One area of concern has to do with employment insurance premiums. They are about 18% in excess of the break-even point of the EI fund. The government is taking this excess money, which is in the neighbourhood of $7 billion a year, diverting it to the consolidated revenue fund and spending it on HRDC grants and other scandalous programs.
This is very offensive to hard-working Canadians who pay these employment insurance premiums for the purpose of receiving benefits if they become unemployed. The government is violating the intent and the spirit of the employment insurance program.
Equally important, I would like to point to an issue that really needs to be addressed. Not only is the overpayment unfair in that respect, but municipalities are public employers and, as such, municipalities across Canada pay EI premiums, as well as their workers. All of that money comes from property taxes.
The purpose of property taxes is supposed to be to provide services to properties and projects in the local municipalities. However, by virtue of the fact that there is an overpayment of EI premiums, in effect what is happening is that the property taxes being paid to local municipalities to provide services to those communities are being funnelled into the consolidated revenue fund of the federal government. Property taxes are ending up being spent to support aerospace companies in Montreal, instead of the communities for which they were intended and where they belong.
That is a good illustration of why the EI overpayment is unfair. It is an excessive tax on workers and employers. When the Canadian Alliance forms the government we will immediately lower EI premiums to the break-even point and stop that unfair taxation on property owners and hard-working Canadians.
The Liberal government is spending hundreds of millions of dollars on gun registration. That has to be the absolute height of stupidity, making law-abiding, responsible firearms owners register their firearms. What possible benefit do taxpayers get for this massive expenditure of money? Need I remind the government that criminals do not register their guns? Whether a gun is registered will not determine whether it was used in a crime. In fact, it places responsible firearms owners at the risk of potentially being implicated if their firearms are stolen and used in the perpetration of a crime.
The relevance of this is that taxpayers are being forced to shell out very sizeable amounts of money. I think that at last count the cost of the gun registration program was over $300 million, but I stand to be corrected.