Mr. Speaker, last week, I asked the minister a pretty straightforward question: Why can the Liberals not get anything built on time or on budget? It is a reasonable question that most taxpayers ask, unfortunately, on a far too regular basis. His answer at the time was nonsensical. He completely ignored the question and gave some typical government gobbledygook answer.

Today, I am going to take the opportunity to outline a few examples of the Liberals' wasteful incompetence, and I would like to start local.

The Liberal government committed funds to the Municipality of Rhineland for its Gretna Arena project, but because of delays on the side of the federal Liberal government in signing the contribution agreement and due to, generally speaking, Liberal inflationary policies, the cost of the project ballooned in a huge way. As a result, the municipality cannot afford to move forward with the project any longer. To make matters worse, the Liberal government is trying to shake down the Municipality of Rhineland for $50,000 for part of the costs that went into this project.

Let me move to the national level. The original budget of the Trans Mountain pipeline was what we would call a measly $7 billion. Then the Liberal government went ahead and nationalized it, and the budget ballooned to over $34 billion, nearly five times the cost of the original estimate.

Of course, we can talk about the Liberals' frankly ridiculous and unjustified firearms confiscation scheme. Instead of going after criminals, what they are doing is planning to spend $600 million to expropriate firearms from some of the most law-abiding Canadians in this country, I would argue.

Unfortunately, taxpayers know that I can go on and on, and we know there are many unfortunate, egregious examples, but I would like to ask some simple questions. Has anyone within the government ever lost their job? Even worse, did they receive a bonus for these abysmal failures?

Branden Leslie

$390,412.00