Mr. Speaker, I want to pick up on the theme my colleague mentioned when he said that talk was cheap.
It is true that talk is cheap. What is not cheap is advertising on television. Here are the facts, and it is not pleasant for the government members to hear them. In the Conservative government's eight years, it has spent $610 million on advertising. Annually it is spending $42 million on the economic action plans. It has erected 9,000 billboards across Canada at a cost of $29.5 million. The Conservative government cannot refute it, and it cannot look their constituents in the eyes and justify this kind of expenditure, not when there are these kinds of needs among our veterans for retraining, for purpose-driven retraining, to go forward in the public and private sectors.
The member for Edmonton Centre says he has the answer in terms of how many jobs have been cut. He does not have the answer. The government will not even give the information to the Parliamentary Budget Officer to confirm whether it is 40,000 or 47,000 jobs lost, and there is a hiring freeze on.
My question for the member is simple. Do we not actually have an obligation to stop this silly, unjustifiable partisan spending and to invest in the things that matter to our veterans to give them a new fresh start?