Mr. Speaker, I will be taking the full period of time.
I have to start by addressing the last speaker and speakers before this. Nowhere is there any fact saying that we are not going to take care of the poorest of poor. We are talking about a whole plan, having a plan. The economic management that the member talks about, economic management that is going to add $100 billion to the debt in the next three years, is not management, it is suicide. That is going to hurt those poor and that is what is going to lose these programs more than anything else we might do.
It is like the cab driver said last night when I was in the cab. He said: "I have heard it all before. It doesn't matter what happens in these elections. It doesn't matter because they are all the same. They get there and they are not going to change a thing. They don't have a plan. They are not dedicated. They don't mean it. They just go and do the same thing".
While we hear all this double talk and all this talk about the poor and the tears roll down the eyes, they do not have a plan. There is nothing there. There is nothing behind it. It is just all more talk and I agree with that cab driver.
I heard another speaker say that these were simplistic approaches. Voters want it simple once in a while. They want somebody with a plan they can understand, not a bunch of legal double talk, a bunch of on in the future some place we are going to handle this problem of our debt and deficit. They want it done now and they mean now, right now, and that is what we are here talking about.
I come back to why I even came to this job. There are times we all wonder why we are here. The reason is the government was not listening. It was a top down kind of process that we had here. There was spending and waste. All of us knew about it and all of us were disgusted by the waste that we talked and heard about.
It does not really matter, we thought, what party one elects and I am coming to believe that. It does not matter whether it has the PC tag or the Liberal tag. They are all so much the same.
We send good people from home and those good people all of a sudden come back and tell us what the party says is best for us, it is what the party wants us to do. We are so hung up on this undemocratic party process in this place.
Probably the worst day since I have been here was February 22 last year. I felt like wearing a black arm band. We had a finance minister who gave us a budget or whatever it was, but it did not address anything that the people had been saying since 1984. It did not say anything about the debt and deficit, about what our foreign creditors were telling us. It did not address anything.
The government members said it did not have time, that it had only been here for three months. It should have had that plan in place long before the election was ever called.
We each had that sunken feeling on the 22nd and we said we are not going to let that happen again. You are going to see our alternate budget. You are going to see it before you see the finance minister's budget. You are going to get a chance to compare.
I challenge-