The Minister of Health is asking if health care is one of those pet projects. No, health care is recognized by Canadians as a serious spending project.
The point I am trying to make is that money could be garnered from other sources. I have a list here, and it is quite an interesting list. The gun registry is certainly one of them. The long gun registration program was supposed to cost $2 million. In the year 2005, the Auditor General expects the cost to be almost $1 billion. By the way, she could not finish her audit because of the bad paper trail of the government. It is that kind of spending I am talking about.
There is the HRDC boondoggle, in which another $1 billion was handed out without proper management by the government. We could also talk about the EH-101 helicopter debacle or the Prime Minister buying two Challenger jets. We could talk about the GST tax fraud and the advertising and sponsorship fraud, which most of us know as the Groupaction case. There are many examples that show the government has not managed the spending of our dollars well and has wasted money. Quite frankly, Canadians did not support these programs in the first place.
One thing that Canadians have asked for, and which we hear about every day in our offices, is some tax relief. We heard my colleague talk about the airport security tax. We hear the marine industry talking about the taxes that it is now facing. There are transportation taxes and taxes on gasoline. They just go on and on, these taxes that the government has put on Canadians to pay for, I would suggest, programs that are not supported by the majority of Canadians.
Not only is the government putting this burden of taxation on Canadians, but it is not managing the money well. I have spent the last year sitting on the public accounts committee and let me say that every day is a new adventure in how the Liberal government is mismanaging our money. It is quite clear to me that the government is wasting literally billions of dollars through programs over which it does not have control. One example is the Groupaction case, which showed quite clearly and quite blatantly that not only did senior management in the government departments break all the rules in the book, which try to control how they spend taxpayers' money, but they had no control over where it was going.
When the government asks for another $14 billion to continue that kind of mismanagement, one really has to be concerned. Again it comes down to the priorities. We have the gun registry, which sounded like not a bad idea to some people, although it did not work for handguns. It was supposed to cost $2 million and now is going to be at $1 billion by 2005. Over the last seven years, the total number of deaths from firearms averaged about 500 a year, and most were suicides, but over the same period of time, 5,000 women died each year due to breast cancer. Rather than $1 billion, the government's commitment to breast cancer research was $6 million. When talking about the numbers, the seriousness of the concern about deaths and tragedies--