Mr. Speaker, tempted as I am to jump into the current debate, I think I will take advantage of the very few minutes I have to make a few comments as I have every year since I came to the House in 1993.
I will begin by congratulating the finance minister, members of the House and literally thousands of Canadians who participated in the development of this budget. They participate every year. One of the things I particularly admire about our current finance minister is that he instituted a process some years ago to open it up. He took it out of the secrecy of a few backrooms and put it in front of the Canadian people for comment, discussion and debate in the committee rooms, church basements and school gymnasiums across the country. That is what happens.
We are participating in a process which is extremely important. I want to offer a couple of comments to my friends in the official opposition.
The House of Commons in our history, which is British parliamentary history, came into existence to oversee the taking of taxes from people, to comment on and to act as a control and accountability structure for the money that was taken from people and given to the king. The watching, monitoring, criticizing and the acting as a check and a balance on the government has been an important function of this Chamber since its inception, yet this year we had a situation that I have not seen before.
I am in my 12th year of elected office of which I spent five years in a provincial house and I have never seen a situation where the day after the budget was read, the official opposition stood and completely ignored it. It could find nothing to criticize or comment on. It is absolutely incredible to me how the official opposition party, which has long prided itself on being different and into some new politic, immediately realized it did not have much to criticize and it switched tactics. It got back onto something which it thought was a more fruitful political ground but not necessarily more fruitful for the people of this country.
Next week it starts all over again. Next week we will begin a series of meetings with people. We have looked at the initiatives in this year's budget. We have looked at initiatives that we would like to have seen in it. We are thinking anew about some of the concerns that people have raised with us as we have discussed these issues around the country. We will go once more back into the same process.
I would like to use a very simple example just to highlight how useful and how important this process is. The current Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Finance and I have had an interest in employee stock ownership programs for some time. It is an interest that was brought to each of us differentially. In his constituency people approached him and started raising the issue with him. In my constituency in Winnipeg people met with me. Interestingly enough I wrote about it once in one of my householders and a gentleman living a few blocks up the street from my office came in to see me because he had written a book on it.
We began a discussion. We did a little work on it. We took it to the finance minister in that first year and it was felt that there was not a lot of information on it. It was a complex topic so we put it off for a year. During that year we went to work on it. We met with more people and we built a database on it. We had a better understanding of it and we made a presentation on it again.
It is interesting that in this year's budget plan we are beginning to see movement toward it. There is actually a development of some stock option programs and a reference to employee stock option programs in the budget plan, which forms the basis of the work we will do this year. We will go back into it one more time, drawing together experts from the community and looking at how we might make it help small businesses in this instance.
That is what this process is. Literally thousands of people across the country will be invited to participate in the process. In my constituency they come together two or three times during the budget cycle in the fall. We will add our voice to that of everyone else who comes before the committee. We will go to the minister with our ideas about how we can improve the country.
That is what the budget is all about. There is no secrecy in it. The finance minister has consciously run a very open and transparent process, and I think he deserves an enormous amount of congratulations on it.
This is why the budget has come through with such ease. People see it as their budget. People see their concerns reflected in it. There will always be demands for changes and improvements. We will continue to work on that. We will continue to go back into the cycle. We will continue to invite Canadians into the process. It would be interesting to see if the official opposition would take its responsibilities and not hide from them.