Madam Speaker, it is an absolute pleasure to rise once again in the House of Commons to continue the debate we began on Friday with respect to a motion not to have a debate. It is shocking.
I had the opportunity to speak on Friday, and I think it is important, given the continued events in the world, that I give a bit of a review on the topics that we covered previously. We are being asked to spend $2.5 billion, and it is important to give a context so that citizens can better understand the exact nature of that amount of money. As I mentioned previously, it is 1.75% of the projected deficit for this year. We speak colloquially about a ton of money, and this indeed is a veritable ton of money. If we talk about $2.5 billion with respect to the mass of loonies that would be, the math would lead us to understand it would be over 17,000 tonnes, in fact. As I said, it is a veritable ton of money.
The point was made very clearly that it is important in a democratic society that we continue to have free and open debate that is based not only on the rules with respect to how democracy works. We also need to continue to remember those who fought and died for our freedom. We must be mindful that we are not disrespectful to the sacrifices those individuals and their families have made over many years for our great nation.
I also touched on the topic of leadership. Given the current events and the dissension we have see in our country over at least the last weeks, months and years, and especially over the course of the last couple of weeks and in what is going on today, it is important to reflect upon the concept of leadership and exactly what being a good leader is and how that unfortunately has allowed us to live in a country that is so divided. Therefore, it is more important than ever to prevent more dissension as we present differing points of view during this democratic process. Furthermore, not only did we give some rules of leadership to ponder, but there was also a litany of qualities or characteristics that would be important for good leadership. Once again, for the sake of brevity, I will not reiterate the entire list, although if we were to read it back, it is quite excellent. Suffice it to say, I do want to be clear: Good hair did not make that list.
Finally, to begin to tie things together, we talked about the divisive language and, of course, that this has led to party dissension among my colleagues across the aisle. They made headlines across Canada for their comments and for fanning the flames of division inside their own party and among Canadians in general. Many members of the House know, of course, the ancient saying that a house divided against itself cannot stand. Members of the House have often heard from the Liberal Party that there were difficulties in our party. This has been brought up multiple times and was brought up as recently as Friday.