Mr. Speaker, after learning about a $90,000-a-day contract for advice on where to cut in order to eliminate the deficit, now we have learned that the Conservatives paid nearly $2 billion to private consultants in 2010-11, and that was in the public works department alone. To add insult to injury, at the beginning of the summer, that department laid off public servants who could have done the job internally for a lot less money.
Will the Minister of Finance continue to justify this wasteful spending by claiming that his government will save $200 for every dollar spent in the private sector, as he said yesterday and as the President of the Treasury Board maintained today, and that he is going to save $400 billion a year? Is that what he would have us believe?