Mr. Speaker, during questions and comments, I asked the Minister of Infrastructure and Communities what his definition of infrastructure was. After a rather flowery response, he concluded that infrastructure is everything Canadians use. Therefore, it is a pleasure in this debate to address the self-styled minister of everything about his no doubt important file, but perhaps not quite as important as he has invested it to be.
My colleague, the infrastructure minister, is actually my neighbour. Our ridings back in the Edmonton area are right beside each other. I know that he served for a long time as a city councillor in Edmonton and justly earned respect for his service. However, it is unfortunate to see that since coming here to Ottawa, he has been imbibing alarming quantities of Liberal Kool-Aid.
After arriving here, the minister joined his Liberal colleagues in voting against our motion to approve the energy east pipeline. Clearly he is in favour of infrastructure, except vital energy infrastructure that is needed to create jobs in his riding and in my riding in the Edmonton area. I very highly doubt that he was highlighting that vote in his communications with his constituents back home.
When the new cabinet was sworn in, the minister said, “I just want to make sure that Albertans understand that they have nothing to worry about”. Then he voted against the energy east pipeline.
The government had to be dragged kicking and screaming to finally extend EI coverage, at similar levels as the rest of the province, to the Edmonton region. Certainly that was not its initial intention.
Albertans are justly worried about whether the minister is actually respecting their hard-earned tax dollars and whether the government cares about what is happening in Alberta. As a city councillor, the minister spoke a lot about infrastructure, but as a minister, as I alluded to earlier, he is not even clear about what infrastructure really is.
Canadians can look at page 92 of the budget, which shows a pie chart of what the government means by infrastructure, and it really seriously seems to mean that infrastructure is everything Canadians use. When it talks about investing in infrastructure, that includes everything up to and including child care.
During the committee of the whole a few weeks ago, I asked the Minister of Finance if he thought child care was infrastructure. He said he did. I asked him if there is anything the federal government does that does not qualify as infrastructure. The best he could come up with was that the tax changes the government brought in as part of one of its bills did not qualify as infrastructure. It seems that the government really regards everything that involves the programming activities of the government as infrastructure. There is social infrastructure and cultural infrastructure.
It is not at all clear to me what the job of the minister is in relation to his colleagues, especially when he does not have a clear sense of what exactly he is supposed to be doing. That is one major concern I have about the communication and direction we have seen from the minister on this.
Building on that, when the minister was first elected, he took a $46,000 transition bonus from the City of Edmonton, despite the fact that he started collecting his MP salary the day after the election. Given how bad the minister is at getting deals on furniture, it is perhaps understandable that he needed the money. The outrageous expenditures of the minister for his office renovations and new furniture are beyond the pale. Really, they stretch credulity. He spent $835,000 for this newfangled, beautiful, I am sure, office, far eclipsing any other minister or what is ordinarily spent on this sort of thing.
Back home in the Edmonton area, Edmontonians and Albertans have seen this movie before. Indeed, we had a premier in Alberta who spent $760,000 on upgrades for a residential area at the top of Alberta's Federal Building. That premier was Alison Redford, and those upgrades were to her infamous sky palace.
I think the minister would have been wise to learn from the cautionary tale provided by the rather unceremonious end to Premier Alison Redford's political career, yet the minister went ahead to spend more on his office renovations than Premier Redford did on those particular upgrades to her proposed residential suite.
My colleague has quite rightly called this sky palace 2.0. Of course, anyone who watches movies knows that 2.0 has to be bigger than the first edition, and indeed, it was in this case. It is disappointing to see the minister show such flagrant disrespect for hard-earned taxpayers' dollars.
I do not mind sharing a little bit with the minister about the situation of my own office. Obviously, the situation is quite different. MPs have a much smaller staff. However, in my office situation. Including interns, I currently have six full-time people working in my Ottawa office, and that does not include myself. We have two rooms in our office in the Confederation Building where these people work along with me, and this includes our use of meeting room space. I am proud that we have no problem getting the work done in the space that we were given, and that is important.
The attitude of the minister, I believe, should be to dream big for Canada, but when it comes to his office, to make do with what he has. Yes, dream big, but do not dream big about the size of one's office. When the Prime Minister said that better was always possible, I do not think Canadians knew he was referring to the size of ministerial offices.
The minister's best argument that he can come up with in defence of his behaviour and the behaviour of his office in this context is that he says, well, in some sense there was not really an infrastructure minister before, which is patently not true. The fact that the minister had other responsibilities does not change the fact that we definitely had a minister of infrastructure. We not only had a minister, but a minister who was quite active with a clear sense of what infrastructure actually was, what infrastructure actually meant, and a minister who brought in the building Canada fund, which was the biggest long-term investment in Canadian real infrastructure ever.
When Canadians think about infrastructure, I think that they usually think of things such as roads, bridges, and the hard infrastructure that is vital for our transportation needs. It is not that this other stuff is not important, but we need to have a sense of what we are actually talking about when we talk about infrastructure.
There is a general point that needs to be underlined here and that is the point of respect for taxpayers. Of course, in the scheme of the total federal budget, the amount the minister spent is a relatively small percentage of the overall total budget. However, when Canadians see how ministers and members of Parliament spend their budgets, it communicates clear information about whether or not those ministers, those members of Parliament, respect taxpayers and understand and appreciate that the money we spend is not our money. It is money that Canadians had to work hard to earn. That is what is communicated when we see this kind of disrespect for taxpayers.
It is about the money, yes, but it is also about the message that it sends about whether or not we care about the people who sent us here and who work hard to pay for public expenses. Clearly, this action of the minister, spending $835,000 on sky palace 2.0, going beyond Alison Redford's sky palace, in fact, is not something that shows respect for taxpayers.
I have the minister's mandate letter with me. Part of his mandate letter is to “Support the Minister of Indigenous and Northern Affairs to improve essential physical infrastructure for Indigenous communities including improving housing outcomes for Indigenous Peoples”.
I wonder what kinds of housing improvements could have been achieved for aboriginal Canadians with $835,000. How many houses could have been built with that kind of money?
This is the kind of question we need to ask, because Canadians, Albertans, people in the Edmonton region, expect that when ministers come to Ottawa they have respect for taxpayers' dollars, that they do not drink the Ottawa Kool-Aid so fast, and that they focus on representing their constituents, representing taxpayers, and representing the people who sent us here.
I think the minister needs to own up to this and he needs to recognize that this is not an appropriate expenditure of taxpayers' dollars. He also needs to provide some clear definition about what his department is actually talking about in the context of infrastructure.
I hope that going forward we will see a better job from the government, and that we will see actual respect for taxpayers.