Mr. Speaker, when I talk I like a big audience and, since the official opposition, the Liberal Party of Canada, brought this motion forward today, I hope some of them are listening to what some of the rest of us have to say.
If the Government of Canada did not conduct an annual expenditure review that would be cause for criticism by the people of Canada. Every organization should conduct an annual expenditure review. My wife and I do that in our household. We sit down and look at our household bills to see if there are places where we are spending money where it is not necessary. As a member of Parliament, at the end of the year my staff and I sit down and look at where we have spent our budget trying to serve the people in the riding as best we can and we reallocate resources by taking them out of one area and putting them into another.
When I look at the size of the budget of Canada, approximately $200 billion a year, and the number of dollars that are involved in this expenditure review, which is about $1 billion, that is about half of a percent. I appreciate that there will be people who will disagree with some of the decisions that were made and where the trimming took place, but for the Liberal Party or any other party to suggest that this is some large scale reduction of expenditures or that there are massive cuts to programs is untrue and it exaggerates the point.
We should also make the distinction between dollars that are spent actually delivering services to people who need those services and dollars that are spent supporting organizations that often turn around and use those dollars to lobby the government to get more resources.
Does the member not agree that the Government of Canada should do an annual expenditure review? Does she really think that changes less than 1% should be labelled as extreme?