Mr. Speaker, the member is absolutely right. Sometimes I say to my constituents that as a government anybody can balance a budget; when there is almost unlimited access to money, just by raising taxes or cutting the way money is spent, almost anybody could balance the budget. If people had that kind of access in their household budgets, for example, I think they could do that. However, it is how a budget is balanced that is really the key to good government. As the member said, we do not want to repeat how it was done in the 1990s. In fact, we have made a commitment, as my colleague has pointed out, not to do that.
One of the measures in Bill C-9 is to implement the transfer protection payments to Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, Prince Edward Island, Manitoba and Saskatchewan that was announced in December 2009. We need to get that into law. The longer this bill is delayed, as the NDP has done its best to do, the longer it will take to put this and other measures in place.