So it's official, John Manley will table his first - and most likely last - budget a week from today. 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 $1 billion pretty quickly - think Human Resources Development Corp. 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 $1 billion 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 $1 billion 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 dollars could have purchased in the area of crime prevention and public safety:

• $1 billion could have been used to allocate $3,235 more to investigate every violent crime committed in Canada in 2002.
• For $1 billion 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.
• Victims of crime generally receive between $5,000 and $25,000, when they do receive compensation, which isn't common. With $1 billion though, we could compensate 40,000 victims of crime at the highest level.
• If we were really interested in catching the bad guys -- you know the murderers who take our family and friends -- $1 billion could be used to spend $1.8 million per reward to help get a conviction for every murder committed last year in the country.
• Once we found these people, tried them and hopefully convict them, $1 billion could pay for 40% of all adult jail costs for a year.
• $1 billion could be used to pay for the running of all courts in Canada, with a cool $75 million left over -- enough to purchase 20 state of the art MRI machines.
• If getting guns off the street were really the government's intention, $1 billion 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.
• If we wanted to be proactive, $1 billion could be used to 17% more police officers to walk the beat and patrol our streets - that's 68,000 officers in 2003.
• Toronto had 60 homicides last year. One billion dollars could operate Toronto's police force - the country's largest - for two years.

Finally, $1 billion 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. 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 10, 2003
Topic: Federal

Contact the regional director Gregory Thomas for further information.

Type: In the News

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