Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to have the opportunity to follow up on a question I asked earlier in the session with regard to the costs of the G8 and G20 summits. The timing of the question that day was interesting. On the same day that the Government of Canada announced it would stop funding some lighthouses, including the famous Peggy's Cove lighthouse in Nova Scotia, it was funding fake lighthouses for the G8 and G20 summits. That unbelievably wasteful, extravagant decision contrasted so much with the historic and traditional nature of real lighthouses in coastal Canada. It was not just the $186,000 that was spent on a fake lighthouse. There was a fake Toronto stock exchange built at a cost of $208,000 metres away from the real stock exchange. There was the famous fake lake and fake animals as well. The Conservatives spend money like water off a fake duck's back. It is unbelievable. There was also the cost of communications around the G8 and G20 summits.
This spending has really hit a nerve among Canadians. They think at this point in time when the Conservatives have a deficit of $56 billion, to add another $1 billion is totally wasteful, inefficient, egregious and unnecessary, especially when we look at the cost of previous summits.
I want to bring people's minds back to 1995 when former prime minister Jean Chrétien and the regional minister, David Dingwall, announced that the G7 would take place in my home community of Halifax Dartmouth. It was big news. In fact, an article from that time states,
The Halifax Summit Office (HSO) confirmed today that its budget for this year's G7 Summit Meeting will be approximately $28 million.
And it came in on budget. The article went on to say:
The budget of the Halifax Summit Office encompasses all of the operational aspects of the Summit from staffing to printing and security.
The summit in Halifax was not a low-key event. People like Bill Clinton, Boris Yeltsin and John Major came to Halifax. It was a wonderful summit. Even at that what was very interesting is that according to a news article of April 30, 1995, a spokesperson for the Canadian Taxpayers Federation said that the federal government was wrong to put that G7 summit in Halifax because the city needed too many government funded fix-ups. The spokesperson said that the federal government “should have chosen a location which would not cost that kind of money”.
The person who said that is now sitting in the federal cabinet as the Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism. In 1995, $28 million in his view was too much to spend on a summit and then his own government spent well in excess of $1 billion. People simply do not understand how that could possibly be the case. So much could have been done with that $1 billion.
The government cancelled programs like the Canadian Council of Learning, $80 million over five years. There have been cuts to literacy, cuts to victims of crime initiatives. Canadians understand the government wastes money and is the biggest tax and spend government in history. However, the government is showing its incompetence by spending $1 billion-plus on a weekend of meetings that were held in two separate locations. It could have been done a lot cheaper.
Other countries have done it cheaper. Italy, Japan, Germany, Russia held these meetings before and did it much cheaper than Canada did. It was an incredible amount of money to be spent at a time when we are reeling from the incompetence that already existed in the government's handling of the national finances. People do not accept that. It was too much. It was too rich. It was too extravagant. Canadians could not afford it and they made that known.