Mr. Speaker, I thank the member for Louis-Hébert for his question.
This is the same rhetoric about budget cuts that we have been hearing for the past two years. I admit that there were cuts to the agency. We should remember that everything was going well at the time. The border control situation was not what it is today.
As the Auditor General pointed out, this situation has resulted in costs of more than $1 billion just to address the Roxham Road problem. This has led to a great deal of work for the agency and created enormous needs. Now they are saying that the problem was created by Conservative budget cuts. When we made budget cuts, it was to balance things. Naturally, the situation then was much different from what it is now.
If a war were to break out somewhere in the world and we decided to deploy our armed forces, as we did in Afghanistan, the current National Defence budget would obviously not be sufficient to intervene. We would have to vote on and increase the budget accordingly.
That is what is happening now. Dealing with Roxham Road costs over $1 billion, not including what the provinces pay. That brings the total to nearly $2 billion. That is where there is a resource shortage. People should stop saying that the Conservative government cut budgets. We made those cuts when everything was fine at the border, before that mistake was made.