Mr. Speaker, I asked the Minister of Transport a question a couple of weeks ago that was not well answered. In fact, his answer was very dismissive. I asked about the seven out of seven infrastructure projects that had been announced in British Columbia that were all in Conservative ridings and suggested there might be a bit of pork barrelling going on. The minister responded that it is not surprising to have all of the projects in Conservative ridings given how many Conservative ridings there are in British Columbia.
I would like to give the Minister of Transport an arithmetic lesson. Counting up the number of Conservative ridings, it is actually 61%. I hope that the minister is not someone who would get 61% on an examination, and go home and tell his parents and friends that he got 100%. There is a large gap between those two numbers and to justify all of the announced investments going into Conservative ridings on that completely misleading and fallacious basis is unacceptable.
Unfortunately, I am seeing in the House a decaying of the tone that we were setting. After prorogation, the Prime Minister appeared to have learned the lesson that this is a minority government that actually needs to work with its colleagues in the best interests of Canadians. There is an economic crisis that needs us to band together and think about why we are here as members of Parliament. We are not here to spend government money. We are here to serve taxpayers and think about their well-being.
I remind the Minister of Transport that the funds we spend are the taxpayers' funds. They are not the government's funds. As such, they have to be handled with the utmost transparency and integrity, not with arrogance and duplicity. Unfortunately, the tone of cooperation that we saw in January has severely eroded. We are getting back to the kind of non-answers to questions that were so prevalent when I was first elected and, to my shock, found that this was a House where the government members could taunt rather than answer.
Not only do we have concerns about the targeting of infrastructure to Conservative ridings, we also have the situation of a $3 billion fund that is being put aside. There is a complete and utter unwillingness to be accountable for that money. That is a betrayal of the trust of taxpayers and it is simply not acceptable. The Prime Minister and his team do not do justice to the trust the taxpayers and voters put in us. The basis of our democratic system is that trust. We need to rebuild it, not undermine it.