Madam Speaker, I will be brief, obviously of necessity, which of course is my usual pattern anyway.
I would like to emphasize that I support this motion. It is atrocious that the government is wasting billions of dollars on unaccounted for programs such as the gun registry, the billion dollar boondoggle in HRDC, and the millions of dollars that are spent in advertising in Quebec. It takes all of this money from Canadian taxpayers, including money collected on gasoline, and pays back such a paltry amount to maintain our roads.
I look around at the different roads in this country that I have travelled on and almost universally they are terribly substandard compared to those in the United States. As a matter of fact, whenever I go down there it usually takes me about a month or so to adjust back to the poor road design and construction in Canada. It is time that we put some real money into that because with a country as vast as ours, it is obviously very important that we have good transportation systems.
With the railroads in this country increasingly being cut back, more of our goods and services are being hauled by trucks on our highways. We had better have good roads. They had better be in good shape not only for the efficient movement of our goods and services, but also for safety.
I would like to point out again a couple of my hobby horses. The 1.5¢ per litre tax that the government imposed to reduce the deficit is redundant because the deficit is gone. We thank the Liberal government for taking our advice over the last 10 years and eliminating the deficit. That tax was brought in as a deficit reduction measure and the tax is still here. It ought to be gone because that was the justification for it at that time.
Of course, as a mathematician I must always add that with the 7% sales tax on top of that, it is not 1.5¢ a litre. It is really $1.605¢ per litre that the government is taking from us. It is taking billions of dollars, year after year, and not returning to the provinces the money that they so desperately need to provide for a high grade, up to date, and modern road system.