Mr. Speaker, during the next few minutes, I will try to reply to two statements that struck me in the speech of my Liberal colleague. First, Mr. Speaker, he compared the Bloc Quebecois, as the Official Opposition, to the Liberal Party when they were the Official Opposition. Let me remind him that he should not mix apples with oranges.
As the Official Opposition we have been saying right from the beginning that in the area of public finances we were reaching out to the government to make a democratic effort to launch a thorough review of all Canadian finances, not only budgetary expenditures, but also tax expenditures.
Instead, since the beginning of November, the Minister of Finance has gone through an endless round of consultations with economists and institutions here and there. In Quebec, we call that an acute case of consultationitis. It looks like a strange rerun of what we have known since the Meech failure with all the other constitutional conferences, forums and discussions. Remember the Citizens' Forum on Canada's Future, chaired by Mr. Keith Spicer, and the Beaudoin-Dobbie and Beaudoin-Edwards commissions. I feel the Minister of Finance wants to repeat the same scenario with budgetary and tax expenditures instead of implementing a real measure of-