Mr. Speaker, if a small businessman juggled his books to avoid paying taxes like the government is juggling its books to avoid public scrutiny, they would be in jail making licence plates, except in Canada where they would be watching cable television.
These spending cuts were promised by the finance minister in the 1995 budget to justify his $7 billion gutting of health and education transfers to the provinces. Two years later we find that it is all a big sham, that the government did not make the cuts.
Why has the finance minister cooked his own books to mask his government's failure to cut spending while forcing provinces and Canadians to pay the price of his inaction?