Mr. Speaker, we were there when the budget was tabled yesterday. The budget tabled by the Minister of Finance is, in some ways, a sort of exercise in centralization with the creation of a national revenue commission, an exercise in cosmetics because it hides the nasty blows of the government's decisions to the unemployed, to women and to the provincial governments, and an expression of incompetence by the government, which has done nothing more to cut its expenditures than it did in past budgets.
My question is for the Prime Minister or the Minister of Finance. Will they acknowledge that the establishment of a national revenue commission, like the securities commission announced in the speech from the throne, is an act of centralization revealing the government's uncontrollable propensity to assume powers that are, constitutionally, in the hands of the provincial governments?