Mr. Speaker, perhaps the hon. member did not have an opportunity to look at the budget, but if he had, he would have seen that the supplementary estimates (C) for the Conservative government's March 2010 budget contained $179 million that was earmarked for the G8 and G20 meetings.
I do not profess to stand here as the eminent expert on G8 and G20, but what I will say is that this is the most expensive summit, by 300%, that has ever been held anywhere on the planet, and here is what I, or any layperson, could conclude pretty quickly. If the rest of the world can do it for 300% less, or in some cases, many times less than even that, surely we could. Surely we could have done this for hundreds of millions of dollars less.
The reality is that this steals from priorities that Canadians care about.