I only quoted a highly placed employee in the ministry of finance of the Government of Ontario who called it a bribe to the governments of the Atlantic provinces. That will already take a significant proportion of that built-in reserve.
Let us say it will still be worth $2.5 billion. What we are talking about is $5 billion that is put into the budget as a source of income which the government has no right to have in there. By definition, including the contingency reserve, the government will not meet its target. I ask myself: Why is the contingency reserve there? In case something bad happens.
We heard many witnesses in the finance committee say that almost certainly within the next two or three years the United States economy will slow down significantly. Expansions never last forever and it has already had an expansion of almost seven years.
The contingency reserve on spending was put in there because there might be another upheaval in capital markets outside Canada like there was in Mexico. The contingency reserve was put in there because we might find there may be a little disturbance in Canadian capital markets because of political developments in Quebec.
Put that on top of the dilemma in which the government finds itself of having used to achieve its targets money that is not meant for that use. There will be very serious questions raised about the budget. These are questions which I did not raise before. After all, it is one thing for special interest groups, for the representatives of employers and workers, to come before human resources development and make their case.
It is now serious because the Minister of Human Resources Development has added his very influential voice to all of those who have said that money should not be used for the purpose for which it is being used. It reveals that the government has not had the courage to do on the spending reduction side what is necessary to save the country from bankruptcy. Please do not shoot the messenger. Sooner or later the media would have discovered that anyway.
Interest rates may rise because people will find out that a minister who comes to Wall Street and says we are right on target, we will be at 2 per cent per year, will be found either not competent, that he did not know he could not keep that $5 billion, or that he may have been misleading them deliberately. I do not know what the answer is but I would not be surprised if sooner or later that question came up. How do you think the capital markets will react?
I do not want to be a doomsayer. For the sake of Canada, for the sake of the Minister of Finance, for the sake of the government, I hope everything I said can be in practice truly brushed aside as ideas and analyses produced by an obsolete academic economist who does not know what he is talking about and has ventured into the arena of politics and is out of his depth.
For the sake of Canada I hope I am right, but I have the feeling that what we have coming is a major problem for the government.