It is a real concern.
At any rate, we have here another problem, which is huge, that is, this is a government which, having listened to the NDP arguments, has written down on a piece of paper “we are willing to throw some money at it”. This is so typical of this government. It always measures what it is doing in terms of how many dollars it has thrown at the problem. The Liberals never measure the actual outcome of these effects. It is absolutely incredible that they are doing this.
Mr. Speaker, you would not do this. I would not do it. Let us say I decide that I want to build a house. I have never done that in my life, but if I were to build a house I would not first of all say “this is how much money I am going to spend” and then go and figure out how I can spend all the money. I would probably sit down with my wife and my children and ask, “What kind of a house do we need?” Then, having identified the need and what kind of house we want, how large it is, where it is going to be, et cetera, we would determine how much money we would need.
Instead, these guys start out by just naming a sum. The Liberals do this over and over again; whether it is international affairs or whatever, they talk like that. I think of the gun registry as the best example of them saying, “Let us just throw some money at it”. Once they started throwing it, it went more and more. I like math, so I do a little ratio and proportion and things such as that at an elementary level. I did a small computation. The gun registry was first promised to cost $2 million net. It has landed up now approaching $2 billion. That is 1,000 times as much.
I did a couple of comparisons. Here are two of them. Not long ago, about three years ago, I went and bought myself a new car, a mini-car, a small Honda Civic. It came to around $18,000.
Let us imagine, though, if this would have happened. I say okay to the dealer and tell him I am going to buy this car for $18,000. “It is a lot of money, but I am going to spend it”, I say. I go to pick up that car and he says, “Sorry, we made a little miscalculation. There is an administration fee on doing the book work and it is now going to cost $18 million because that is the proportion of the difference”. On an $18,000 car going up to $18 million, I would say, “Sorry, I decline. Let me out of this”.
But over there is a Liberal government that says it does not matter. The Liberals say they will just keep throwing more money at it and hope that eventually it is all going to work out.
My time is up so I hope that some of the members here have some questions for me and I will be able to enlarge on some other points as well.