LIBERAL SCANDAL PUT INTO PERSPECTIVE

By Garry Breitkreuz, M.P. – February 27, 2004

Do you realize just how big the Liberal government’s scandalous waste of money really is?

According to the Auditor General’s report, the sponsorship program cost at least $250 million of which $100 million went to fees and commissions for Liberal-friendly advertising companies who, in many cases, did little or no work.

Put the waste of your income tax dollars into perspective:

• The federal government could have almost doubled its payment for the ‘National BSE Recovery Program’ to farmers.
• All the taxes paid by Yorkton, Melville, Hudson Bay, Esterhazy and Kamsack were wasted in the Liberal scandal.
• 10,421 people in Saskatchewan could have doubled their income for one year.
• Taxes from 29,579 Saskatchewan citizens were lost.
• Every man, woman and child in Saskatchewan lost more than $251.

Instead of paying off Liberal friends of the government, imagine what that $250 million could have been used for:

• pay the salary of 556 new police officers for 8 years;
• purchase 8,333 police cruisers;
• pay the maximum salary of an additional 206 full-time nurses for the next 25 years;
• pay for over 100 fully operational MRIs;
• pay four years of full tuition for every university student in the province, and have more than $200 million left over;
• give bursaries of $22,810.22 every year for four years to every university student in the province;

• recruit and train 794 new soldiers;
• cover over a month of Saskatchewan’s healthcare expenses; and
• cover a year of total drug expenditures in Saskatchewan.

The Liberals have wasted $250 million on this scandal, but the gun registry fiasco has cost Canadian taxpayers four to eight times as much.  This demonstrates just how much your tax dollars are being wasted by the Liberal government.

The Liberals want us to believe that if we look at the big picture, $250 million is really a very small amount – so why the uproar?  What do you think?

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