It gets beyond idiotic. This is how bad it is. There are members of our military in Afghanistan, and I can put faces on these people because there is a base in my riding, who are very dedicated, very professional people.
The Minister of National Defence has sent our people over to Afghanistan and said “By the way guys, you cannot have guns”. The government on the other side of the House messed up so badly that we put our guys in danger without their being able to have guns in Kabul. That is possibly the most dangerous, if not the most dangerous place on this globe and we put our guys in danger.
What are they supposed to do? When they run into a situation over there, our guys are supposed to put out their arm, point a finger and say “Stop, bang”. It is ridiculous. What kind of management is that? What kind of minister is it who would put our people in danger?
Not only that, we are supposed to find $200 million in that department so we can pay for the gun registry. Maybe they took their guns away. Maybe the people in the military did not register their guns and they cannot take them over there because of that.
We could talk about the Sea King helicopters. Do we want to talk about the budget? Let us talk about the budget. Let us talk about mismanagement. The parliamentary secretary is going to stand and say that there was $42 billion worth of deficit. That was 10 years ago and the mismanagement by that government of that department is absolutely renowned.
A helicopter, the EH-101 was approved in 1992. We would have had the helicopters in place flying right now with our military in safe equipment but what happened? The Prime Minister said “We say no to helicopters”. What was the cost of that political statement? It was $1 billion, the same amount it would have cost to buy the helicopters in the first place. It took $500 million to pay for the cancellation of the contract and another $500 million to fix the helicopters over the last 10 or 12 years. That is mismanagement and it is reflected everywhere in the budget.
More mismanagement and what is not reflected in this budget? Agriculture. I come from an area whose whole economic engine is driven by agriculture. And we will get to fisheries. My friend from St. John's is here and we could talk fisheries when we talk about mismanagement.