Madam Speaker, I am amused by this speech. It is a whole bunch of huff-and-puff trying to defend the indefensible. There are areas of corruption here that are so great they totally neutralize any positive effects the program could have had. It just so happens that when we get that kind of activity in a program, it destroys the value of the whole program.
Besides that, I will tell this member that in Edmonton, which used the sponsorship program to produce those funny little balloons that are banged together and handed out at football games, I had way more complaints about the waste of government money in doing that. In fact, that is the only response I had to it from constituents. I did not have a single person say to me that they were so glad the Government of Canada did that and it made them feel so good about their country. Not one person said that. I asked some people. They said no, that those things were useless, and they asked why we were wasting the money on them.
So even though some of it, as the member said, did not have any of this taint to it, it still was a mostly useless program. If we want to build unity in the country, what we need to do is to run the government in such a way that it is beyond reproach and taxpayers know that their money is being well spent and well managed. That is how we build unity, not through these phoney programs.