Mr. Speaker, I think the hon. member for Vaudreuil is to be commended for the stand he took in his speech on this budget. He is to be commended, but I am somewhat critical of his choice of words. I think he should check the definitions in the dictionary, and I am referring to the fact that he called this a "courageous budget".
I would like to remind the hon. member for Vaudreuil that during the last election campaign, the Deputy Prime Minister made the following promise: "Give me a year, and we will get rid of the GST or at least make some changes to improve it. Give me a year, and if we do not, I will resign". Fifteen or sixteen months later, nothing has changed. The only suggestion the finance committee made was to hide it, to camouflage it and make it a little less blatant.
The hon. member's leader, the Prime Minister, the leader of his own party, the Liberal Party of Canada, said: "Give me a day, and I will make some thorough changes in the pension plan for members of Parliament". Fifteen or sixteen months later, nothing has been done yet. And what is on the table is a mere shadow of pension reform.
The present Prime Minister said during the election campaign: "During our first term, I will not raise taxes or personal income tax". So what did he do in last year's budget? They raised $500 million by de-indexing old age security pensions. What did they do this year? The hon. member for Vaudreuil must know that they raised, or will raise, $500 million by taxing every litre of gas an extra 1.5 cents.
But this is the question I would like to put to the hon. member for Vaudreuil, who has a number of dairy farms in his riding. He must be aware of a consensus among dairy farmers in Canada on one milk, one price. By removing 15 per cent of the subsidy on industrial milk this year and another 15 per cent next year, the government is widening the gap. How will he explain to the dairy farmers in his riding that the gap is getting even wider?
And how can he explain to the farmers in his constituency, and I say this in concluding, why in the west, now that the Crow subsidy worth $560 million has been abolished, farmers will receive $1.6 billion in compensation tax free, when our dairy producers will lose 30 per cent of their milk subsidy without receiving any compensation whatsoever?