Mr. Speaker, this morning a government representative, the member for Edmonton—St. Albert, admitted that he does not read The Globe and Mail, so I will have to read it for him. I want to read a quotation from Robert Fox, the executive director of Oxfam Canada. In The Globe and Mail on May 28 of this year, he said:
It is painful to think a billion dollars is being spent on the security for a three-day event when we are capping commitments to international aid for the next several years because we can’t find the money...It just speaks to our priorities and the fact that when we choose to, we can mobilize resources and when there is a lack of political will, we fall short.
It is clear that this money, as the member just pointed out, could have been used to do a lot of very good things in this country. For example, we could have purchased 1,270 new hybrid buses for public transit systems in Canada. That is just one example of the things we could have done with this money.
Would the member like to comment further on this massive waste of money when the government is in a record deficit of $56 billion?