Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to take part in this debate. I am splitting my time with the hon. member for Malpeque.
Last Saturday I had the privilege, as many of us do on occasion, to attend the Special Olympics regional games in the Halifax area. I could not help but look at all those wonderful people at the Special Olympics who do not have the opportunities in life that many of us do. Of special concern to me are the young Canadians who, after going through high school, because of their condition, in many cases seem to fall off a cliff in terms of their opportunities. While their friends go on to college and university and jobs, a lot of Canadians with disabilities just do not have that opportunity. I was thinking of how many programs $1 billion could provide for them. A lot of people are comparing what other things could have been achieved with the over $1 billion cost for security for the upcoming summits. I am going to talk about a few others but that is what crystallized it for me.
I think a lot of Canadians are wondering why the cost of this is so outrageous and are thinking of the other things that Canada could be doing with that money. People want to know how in the world we could spend $1 billion on security alone for any kind of meeting anywhere in the world.
In 1995, the federal government, under the leadership of Jean Chrétien and the regional minister, David Dingwall, announced that the G7 would take place in Halifax. It was big news in Nova Scotia. A news article on May 4, 1995 said:
The Halifax Summit Office (HSO) confirmed today that its budget for this year's G7 Summit Meeting will be approximately $28 million....
The budget of the HSO [the Halifax Summit Office] encompasses all of the operational aspects of the Summit from staffing to printing and security.
In that article, a spokesperson for the Halifax Summit Office is quoted as saying:
“HSO estimates that fully 60% of its budget will be spent locally on goods and services ranging from accommodation to printing to the direct employment of residents”.
That G7 meeting took place just a decade and a half ago in Halifax. It was a fabulous time in Halifax-Dartmouth. There was work done. There is still legacy work from that G7 summit in Halifax. Leaders like Bill Clinton, John Major, Boris Yeltsin and others came. It went off virtually without a hitch.
My father was the premier of Nova Scotia at the time. It was a fabulous opportunity for the people of Halifax to see world leaders up close. The total cost of that was $28 million.
I want to reference a comment that was made back then by the spokesman for the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. This is from a news article dated April 30, 1995:
The federal government was wrong to put next month's G7 summit in Halifax because the city needs too many government-funded fixups, says a national taxpayers' lobby group.... The federal government “should have chosen a location which wouldn't cost that kind of money”.
The person who said that on behalf of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation is now the Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism. He went on to say:
There are conference facilities available, I'm sure, in that part of the world as well as across Canada that could have hosted an event like this without spending several million dollars....
A decade and a half ago, the person who is now the Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism thought $28 million was too much for an international meeting for the G7. Now the government is suggesting that $1 billion is okay.
How have we gotten to that point? There was a point in time when members who are now on the government side would say that we should value taxpayers' money. Those days appear to be gone. Now we are in a situation where we are talking about $1 billion, $930 million on security alone, plus other costs, which is not only outrageous but is well beyond the original estimates. People are asking what is going on.
In an article in yesterday's Halifax Chronicle Herald, Dan Leger wrote:
So maybe that $1.1 billion should be taken as a very expensive sign that it’s time to do away with these inflated gabfests, especially since every function of a summit other than dinner can now be done over the Internet.
The $1.1 billion might also be a sign that someone has badly mismanaged the preparations, partly because poor planning forced the use of two venues, Muskoka for the G8 and Toronto for the G20. By comparison, the G20 summit in Britain last year cost a paltry $30 million.
The last line of his article states—