Mr. Speaker, the member for Mississauga South may be a little confused in what he is saying. If I understood him correctly, he was saying the proposed reduction in cash and tax point transfers would reduce the leverage to a minimum, the leverage of being able to ask for standards. He said how we think the government can impose some standards or allude to the fact that we should continue to do so.
If the government is to act unilaterally in this way and announce the cuts in advance I hope he is not naive enough to think it will sit down with the provinces and negotiate some sort of standard. There is nothing left to negotiate.
If the hon. member has ever been to a federal-provincial meeting he would find it quite startling to sit down with ministers of other provinces who will say to the Minister of Human Resources Development: "There is nothing left to discuss. You have made the decision on the cuts. What do you want from us?" That will be the dynamic of the meeting.
This points to one of the major weaknesses in this approach. During the election campaign our view was that if we were going to deal effectively with deficit and debt reduction, given that it is all the governments that enter into deficits and debts, it required a joint effort by all governments.
There should have been a formal process, a federal-provincial meeting, in which the government should have set joint objectives in terms of deficit and debt reduction and as a consequence of that, because it would imply reductions in transfers to the provinces, examine line by line areas of joint spending where the federal government uses its spending power to determine where each level of government should be intervening. That was the common sense approach we proposed. His government chose instead to act unilaterally.