Mr. Speaker, if the government added an extra $100 million to the original $179 million that it had foreseen for the expenses and said it was $300 million, that would still leave another $800 million that we could have invested in the people of our country.
We could have invested it in health care, ensuring that our seniors are brought out of poverty, helping to increase pensions for many of the people who are still living below pension levels or investments in our universities. There are so many areas where we could have invested that $800 million that is going to turn around and continue to put us into massive deficit. Having two locations right off the bat indicated that it was going to cost a fortune.
I will go back to that original issue of doing it in Muskoka. I am well familiar with that area. From the very beginning, to suggest that we could even have G8 and G20 summits there was pretty much ridiculous. I did not think it could possibly be done. Was it just an excuse to spend a whole lot of money in that beautiful Muskoka area? To turn around and try it at a second location, one has to expect that there are going to be huge cost overruns.
At the beginning, when the planning was done, I have to question whether that planning was well thought through. It would have been easily visible that we could not have held those two summits in the Muskoka area.