Mr. Speaker, why is it then that, last week, senior officials at the Treasury Board and the assistant auditor general confirmed our fear, a fear we have had for the past six months, of seeing employer and employee contributions used to replenish the federal government's consolidated revenue fund like any other tax or revenue collected by the federal government. Someone somewhere is not telling the whole truth.
In this context, I would like to ask the Minister of Finance the following question: Could he confirm that his government's refusal to transfer any active employment measure to the Government of Quebec may have been motivated not only by his own centralizing designs and those of the Minister of Human Resources Development, but also by the fact that this would create a shortfall of a few hundred million dollars in the federal government's annual budgetary revenue, letting its real deficit show a bit more?