Mr. Speaker, it is a well known fact that the Minister of Finance is a cautious person. He underestimates his revenues and overestimates his expenditures, with the result that he has a margin of somewhere between 8% and 12%.
The minister is also applying a questionable budgeting technique by including in the current budget the $2.5 billion that will be used only in two or three years for the millennium scholarship fund. This, in my opinion, is a questionable technique.
When I was the mayor of my village, people would have been upset at me if I had told them “I am collecting twice the amount of taxes this year, so that we will have a cushion in two years”. The principle is, of course, to make taxpayers pay for the services to which they are entitled, but they should pay in the year that the expenditures are made, or in the year that it is decided to make such expenditures.
The Minister of Finance will end up with a budget surplus in two years, since the $2.5 billion that he will then spend will have already been taken into account in this year's budget.
I wonder if the hon. member for Elgin—Middlesex—London could give us his point of view, if he has a sense of how budgets work, on how the country called Canada should be administered.