He says housing for the troops, my foot. This is $19 million on top of the $100 million. This is a park being developed by DND while it should be protecting Canadians. That is the type of thing the Minister of National Defence is spending money on, rather than focusing on national security and ensuring that we are well protected.
Of course the auditor general had the quote by the Minister of National Defence or his officials saying that the cold war was over, that they really did not need a military anymore and that they would wind it down. On September 11 they had to change their minds. They were caught flat-footed. They were caught with their pants down and the troops disarmed. Now we have to try and catch up. Our helicopters cannot fly, ships cannot sail and on and on.
We are also calling for a reduction in employment insurance premiums by at least 15 cents in the next year. I know that the Minister of Finance brought out the most meager of reductions this week, all of $20 per person per year. That is the maximum reduction per year. Yet the auditor general today said there is $36 billion in that account that does not need to be there. It is overtax. It is a payroll tax. The government suspended the rules so that cabinet could continue to collect the money outside the normal rules of the EI fund.
The government is killing jobs. We are in a recession, yet the government continues to overtax every job in the country through a payroll tax under the guise of employment insurance. It has set up this huge surplus so that it can balance the budget and allow the Minister of National Defence to spend money on his projects in Downsview and the Minister of Health to spend money on projects in his department. The Minister of Canadian Heritage and the Minister of Industry spend money on their projects. They all go around spending money with abandon because people are overtaxed through a payroll tax.
Sell non-core government assets and use the proceeds to accelerate debt reduction is also in our motion. Let me ask the Minister of National Defence this. Why does he not get out of the land development business at Downsview, sell that asset, use the money by putting it into the consolidated revenue fund and have the budget to run the military as he should?
I could go on and on, I am sure ad nauseam for the government side, but I sincerely wish that the government would spend taxpayer money as it would spend its own and not with abandon. If that were the case, we would have all kinds of opportunities and money to spend on the priority items. We would not have a deficit and the country would be a lot better off, if it would just do it.