So it's official, John Manley will table his first - and most likely last - budget on Tuesday, Feb. 18 around 4 p.m. Look for Ottawa to project tax collections of almost $180 billion with program spending hovering around $136 billion and the remaining $44 billion slotted of interest payments on the national debt and a projected surplus.

While it all seems so neat and tidy on paper and in the budget documents, one should stop and ponder what is a billion dollars and what could it actually buy. Of course we know how our federal friends can blow a billion dollars pretty quickly - think HRDC boondoggle or gun registry fiasco - but again, these numbers get thrown around so quickly and in such a cavalier manner that they lose their shock value.

A few years back, a major polling firm asked Canadians to identify how many millions were in one billion. The choices given were 100, 1 000, 10 000 and one million. Only thirty per cent of respondents correctly chose 1,000 millions to make up one billion. Such is the economic literacy of Canadians.

So let's look at one billion dollars this way. If you had a dollar for every second that passed starting from right now and moving forward, it would take you 31 years, 8 months, 16 days and few hours to get to one billion seconds.

Just think of it, HRDC lost this amount of money in one internal audit and the federal firearms, gun registry boondoggle is project to cost us one billion dollars in just under a decade.

In other words, by 2004, the feds have blown three dollars per second on a firearms registry which still doesn't work, hasn't stopped one homicide in a major Canadian city and really is a black eye on the federal Liberals boastful record of strong financial management … a lie if there ever was one.

Here's what $1 billion could have purchased in the area of crime prevention and public safety. One billion dollars could have been used to allocate $3,235 more to investigate every violent crime committed in Canada in 2002.

For one billion dollars you could purchase 21 million gun trigger locks and 21 million long-gun carrying cases or purchase 7 million gun cabinets from as store like Canadian Tire. Here's another idea, victims of crime receive on average between $5,000 and $25,000. If we assume the highest compensation level, then we could compensate 40,000 victims of crime with one billion dollars.

If we were really interested in catching the bad guys, you know the murderers who take our family and friends; one billion dollars could be used to spend $1.8 million per reward to help get a conviction for every murder committed last year in the country. And once we found these people, tried them and hopefully convict them, one billion dollars could pay for 40% of all adult jail costs for a year.

But let's not stop there. One billion dollars could be used to pay for the running of all courts in Canada with a cool $75 million left over to purchase 20 state of the art MRI machines.

If getting guns off the street were really the government's intention, one billion dollars would be better used to budget for 454 years of operating the National Weapons Enforcement Support Team, which has seized 2,000 illegal weapons in two years.

But wait, yours truly has more. If we wanted to be proactive, one billion dollars could be used to 17% more police officers to walk the beat and patrol our streets, - that's 68 thousand officers in 2003.

While we in Ottawa are fortunate to live in a very safe city given our growing population base, imagine Toronto with its 60 homicides last year. One billion dollars could operate Toronto's police force - the country's largest - for two years.

Finally, one billion dollars would allow taxpayers to pay for one year of operating every local police force in all the provinces except Ontario, Quebec and British Columbia with a nice sum of $140 million left over. And coincidentally enough, that is just the amount the feds are pegged to collect in fees for their boondoggle gun registry. We could refund that money back to law abiding gun owners and duck hunters.

By: Walter Robinson
Posted: February 07, 2003
Type: In the News

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