Mr. Speaker, I rise today to follow up on a question that I had asked the government about the revelation that it had spent over $212,000 on the design work for the 2017 budget cover.
I first of all want to thank Blacklock's for its good work in persevering to get this information. If it was not for its dogged determination to pursue that information through the Access to Information Act, that never would have seen the light of day. The government fought it every single step of the way. Blacklock's had to file a complaint with the access to information commissioner because it was being stonewalled by the current government, which clearly was embarrassed by this figure, at least I hope it was. However, the responses from cabinet and the parliamentary secretary before would cause one to think that they had no problems with it and that the $212,000 was a bargain for Canadians, even though it was $36,000 more than the $176,339 it spent in 2016. That was the one where the government hired models posing as middle-class Canadians. I guess that is fair, since the government poses as a government that actually cares about middle-class Canadians and takes their interests to heart. However, we know that it clearly does not care about the tax dollars of middle-class Canadians. It justifies, and does not even apologize for, the fact that it spent over $200,000 on just the photos on the hard copy of a book that I have never seen anyone, other than parliamentarians, with a physical hard copy of. Everyone else reads it online nowadays. After all, we are in 2017. Still it saw fit to include $89,500 for talent fees for the four photos that grace the cover of that.
I know that the parliamentary secretary is keyed up and cued up to give me an answer about how much the Conservatives used to spend to promote their budgets. We spent $600 on the actual budget cover. We used stock photography and paid the $600 licensing fee. Then again, we were a government that actually cared about balancing the budget, which is something that we did. The parliamentary budget officer confirmed that a budget surplus was given to the current government.
However, since this has come out, I did not notice how much the cover of the economic update that was recently tabled will cost. Maybe we will find out later. We know that in that document there was an admission of a broken promise by the current government. It said that it would run a modest, temporary, $10-billion deficit, and we now know that it is twice that. We also know that when it said it would return to balance by 2019, that was fake news as well and that is not going to happen. It now has no plan to ever balance the budget.
Therefore, my question to the parliamentary secretary is this. Is he proud of the fact that the government spent $212,000 of hard-working Canadian tax dollars for some glossy photos for the hard copy of the budget?