Mr. Speaker, the member referred to an increase of a hundred and some million dollars.
For those Canadians who are not watching the hockey game, what we are doing here tonight is debating the full supply of the expenditures that were outlined in the estimates. This generally is a financial debate, but I must pay tribute to the Tories because they caught on very early that if they object to the PCO estimates, it is essentially carte blanche to debate whatever they want. Points of order on relevance will get nowhere because we are essentially talking about the umbrella and anything goes.
In terms of the cost, if we look at the cost of the Prime Minister's Office, in 1984-85 it was $7.3 million. If we look at the cost of the Prime Minister's Office in 1992-93 it was $6.7 million. They just happened to be years when there were Tory governments in place. From 1992-93 we have to go all the way up to 2001-02 before we get back to the amount that was spent in the PMO in the last year of the Mulroney government. We can debate whether ideologically this is what Canadians want us to spend money on, but as hon. members can we not at least acknowledge that what we are talking about is an organization that has exercised fiscal prudence?