Madam Speaker, I want to thank my colleague, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for International Cooperation, for allowing me five minutes to deal with this issue. I wanted to be on the record because after the budget is tabled, if we have not put our thoughts to the minister and to the finance department, we have no one to blame but ourselves.
I personally believe that this budget will be the most important budget that the Minister of Finance has ever tabled. I believe it will be a career-making or a career-breaking budget. In the last eight years we have had huge bonuses in the economy as a government and as a House of Commons. The GST take alone, in the last eight years, has been almost $200 billion which has gone into the system.
I want to be on the record on three specific points to the Minister of Finance and to the finance department.
First, I am afraid to death of the way we are treating small businesses at this precise moment. I have heard in the last two weeks from small businesses that the banks are starting to lose the sensitivity they built up over the last number of years. I appeal to the Minister of Finance to make sure the banks become very sensitive to small businesses over the next few months as we go through this bad patch. Mr. Greenspan in the United States made that point a few days ago to the banks of America.
The second point I want to raise has to do with the issue of consumer confidence. As a government we have very little influence. Our leverage in making an impact on this economy and on confidence is marginal now because we have retreated so much from the economic activity of this country. Our leverage is very small in this grand economy. We will have to do something bold to really have an impact, to really have some leverage and to recapture some of the consumer confidence that was there just eight months ago. It was fragile before September 11 and it is obviously much more fragile now.
My recommendation is that we look seriously at giving Canada a six month GST holiday. I would prefer it for a year but I would settle for half the loaf. That would really give a blast of confidence and put some juice into our economic system. It is something we need to do because playing around the edges will not rebuild the confidence that is sorely needed.
I am absolutely frustrated that we do not have more time to deal with budget preparation. This should be a debate with unlimited hours. We should throw the clock away. The notion that this debate has to end in such a short time is tragic, especially when it is the most important economic moment probably in 50 years of our country's history.
I humbly and firmly appeal to the Minister of Finance and to the officials in finance to be bold and make sure we think of those people who are part of that human deficit right now because that is really why we are Liberals. The human deficit is much more important than the fiscal deficit.