Madam Speaker, I wish members on the other side of the House and the government could actually see the wisdom of that kind of measure.
The Nova Scotia government, the NDP members of Parliament and members from the other side of the House from Nova Scotia have made that point. We need to have some kind of fair accounting and a method by which we can keep some of the wealth that is now being generated.
The size of this potential clawback that is going to be visited upon the Atlantic region, because of the re-figuring of the census, could be as high as $500 million. That is a figure that Bernard Lord, the Premier of New Brunswick, has mentioned. It is an astounding figure. Half a billion dollars would keep a lot of schools and hospitals going across Atlantic Canada. In fact, it amounts to over 70% of the spending on public schools in Nova Scotia. It is almost equal to the budget of the capital district health authority, which I mentioned earlier.
We are talking about money that could absolutely cripple society and life as we know it in the place that we come from. This is at a time when we have already fallen way back in terms of our standard of living and the ability to keep our young people in the region with the hope of a good life in the future.