Mr. Speaker, let us deal with the last question first. The hon. member from the Bloc asked what we would do with the surplus funds.
The surplus funds, as he well knows and as everyone in Canada knows, go into the general revenue fund to help fund our programs, our valued social programs. He understands too that even as recently as just a couple of months ago when the Auditor General made her report, she said that it was a completely acceptable accounting practice to put these surpluses into the general revenue fund. The hon. member has his answer. I suppose he would have known that answer all along but he just wanted to see if I knew the answer.
The member then mentioned something about Transport Canada. Yes, I was on the transport committee with the hon. member. In fact I was on the transport committee when I was first elected in 1988. That was a great time. We were in opposition and we had all kinds of proposals on the table, including for example the high speed rail project.
We examined that. We went across our country and across Europe. We looked at the different modes of transportation, the different high speed projects that are found throughout the world. It was pretty clear that while it was a great proposal, there were factors such as the population densities. In France, for example, the population densities are great. In the United Kingdom the population densities are great.
Here in Canada of course we have a population that is spread out for miles across the country, tens of thousands of kilometres. It makes it a little less viable when it comes to trying to pay for a system by the passengers paying a toll, so it becomes a responsibility of the government. When we started to price that project, we were talking about billions, with a capital B , of dollars of investment in order to make a project like that work.
At that time, and at this time, when the government is being fiscally responsible and money is tight, it can be rather difficult to convince Canadians of that. We are trying to ensure that we have a viable health care system in this country. We are trying to ensure that there is lifelong learning for our children. We are trying to ensure that there are extra child care spaces, and we announced some 48,000 child care spaces in the last budget. We are trying to ensure that our economy is stable, that our interest rates are low and that a person can go out and buy a car or a refrigerator tomorrow and not have to worry about whether or not they are going to have a job the next day in order to pay for that refrigerator or that car. That is called fiscal responsibility.
Do we have options on the table? Absolutely. Do we want to build a high speed rail project? Let us do it, except it is going to cost billions of dollars that may otherwise be spent on projects and on our social foundations which are the priorities of Canadians today. Those are the priorities.
We are interested in the priorities of Canadians. We are interested in the priorities of those who find themselves out of work and need the assistance of employment insurance. We want to make sure it is there for them. It is there for them. It will continue to be there for them. Of course those rights that are charged for Canadians for that program are always going to be fiscally sound in order to ensure that Canadians are not paying $3.29, or whatever it was back in the Tory days, but $1.98, what it is now down to, because we are being fiscally responsible.