Mr. Speaker, my colleague from Timmins speaks to the true heart of these decisions that get made. Time and time again when there are dollars to be spent, certainly it has been for no lack of money over the last decade, this country has increasingly been doing better and better. We have been in a boom for some time. The government had all sorts of dispensation to spend money.
The current government is looking at another surplus that by every news report seems to be growing. So in this overtaxed world, there is an opportunity to spend money and invest and truly invest. For the price of one of those more elaborate pieces of art at the Toronto International Airport that somehow was sloughed onto the taxpayers, decided by a previous government costing some billion dollars or more at this airport, we could have had a thousand foot extension on a runway in northwestern British Columbia to allow a $500 million mine to go ahead, producing all sorts of wealth not just for the region but for the entire country.
Instead, for political partisan reasons of these various committees and commissions that get appointed, decisions get made and money gets put into all sorts of silly little pet projects rather than where it is really needed in our infrastructure to make this country stronger.