We have got lots of them, Mr. Speaker. I have been holding this one back, because it comes from one of the most quotable and most ridiculous members of Parliament that have ever sat in this House in the last 150 years.
…the minister has been at his post for five years…. The Sea Kings are no closer to being replaced.… Instead there are Challenger jets to fly the Prime Minister and his cabinet around in luxury.
Who said that? Think, folks. It was the member for Calgary West.
We are having fun with this, but this is not a funny issue. This is about a contempt for the Canadian people. The Prime Minister told Canadians in 2006 that he would clean up this culture of entitlement. Instead, his attitude was that he would clean up the Liberals, and once they were done, then he and his friends would pork out at the trough.
That is not what Canadians voted for. This is not about saying that the Prime Minister and his family should not use the Challenger for security reasons, although I note that the present Minister of Industry said:
There is something else the government can do. If the government wants to show confidence in the commercial airline industry, here is a suggestion. Will the Prime Minister park his Challenger jet and fly commercial skies as other Canadians do as a sign of faith that security works?
That is what the present Minister of Industry said when he was in opposition. He wanted the Liberal Prime Minister to fly commercial air, but he has not said that in cabinet because they enjoy the perks.
Again, this is abuse of the public trust from a government that said it would do something better. The Conservatives are doing it at a time when they are telling senior citizens that the cupboard is bare; when they are telling veterans who served our country, “Hey, buzz off, we are done with you, and we will go to court to fight you”; when they are telling first nations children in the north, “You do not deserve schools because we cannot afford them”. However, when it comes to looking after their pals, there is all the money in the world.
Speaking of which, I go back to the Minister of Justice and his complaint about the cost of food. He wanted to know how they could justify wasting that much money on a flight. Yet we just found out that the Prime Minister spent $32,000 feeding his hand-picked crew who went to Israel. That was $150 per meal, and if we look at what they were serving, oh, man, those sandwiches looked pretty brutal. If they are going to blow money like that, at least they could serve people well.
We Canadians expect better from this Prime Minister and we are not getting it. That is why we brought this forward, and we are doing it in a non-partisan manner. This is what the Conservative Party stood for. We are asking Conservatives to return to their roots. Perhaps they have forgotten where they came from. Perhaps they have forgotten how they used to be offended by the use of taxpayers' dollars to help friends, insiders, and buddies.
This is a moment where we reach out across the aisle to our poor, wayward, lost children of the Conservative Party and try to bring them back into the fold of accountability and say, “This is just one little way of doing this”.