Plus secretarial staff, office space and so on. There are a lot of things we are not being told about like the expense account that goes with this position.
While there are people who will not even get a Christmas basket as the holidays are approaching, who have nothing to eat, parliament, with its full coffers, has pretentiously provided itself with a poet laureate. This too is a disappointment, and makes this the blackest week I have lived through here since 1993.
The Minister of Finance often says that he consults the public to come up with a very transparent budget. He sees to it that prebudget consultations are held by the Standing Committee on Finance, on which I sit along with other members from all parties, including the Canadian Alliance and, of course, the government party.
Several witnesses appear before the committee, which sits for hours and weeks. The Minister of Finance says that it is based on these consultations, based on this infamous report that he prepares his budget. That is hogwash. We saw this week that it is hogwash.
The Bloc Quebecois wants to emphasize the fact that, as in previous years, these prebudget consultations are, unfortunately, a somewhat hypocritical exercise, since the Standing Committee on Finance and the Minister of Finance do not really take into consideration the recommendations and grievances of Quebecers and Canadians on how federal surpluses should be used. No one is fooled by the government's approach. We know that the die has already been cast, as we saw this week.
Therefore, I wish to present—because I already spoke on the budget—the dissenting opinion of the Bloc Quebecois regarding the report on the 2001 prebudget consultations that was tabled by the Liberal government.
Hon. members will see that we were right. We do not merely condemn. We have figures. We work on these figures and we make reasonable suggestions to help the public at a time when everyone is a bit stressed out because of recent events. There already was a downturn before September 11. We had anticipated that and we proposed solutions in our report. This is what I want to explain to hon. members today.
First, let us talk about the government's fiddling with the figures. Unfortunately, the federal budget process has become a cover-up operation instead of an information tool on the state of Canada's public finances. As we were all able to see over the past few years, the Minister of Finance has this nasty habit of underestimating budget surpluses. This year, he not only underestimated revenues, he also overestimated expenditures. This is even worse.
Since 1996, the federal government has accumulated budget surpluses of about $35 billion. Instead of making everyone happy through good governance, this government has shown its inability to anticipate its deficits by artificially increasing them while underestimating budget surpluses, as I mentioned earlier. The government did the same thing again this week.
It excluded from all public debate nearly $60 billion in manoeuvring room, which the Bloc Quebecois with considerably fewer means had managed to estimate more precisely. For five years now, with the figures and means we had, we have been out by about $4 billion with the actual figures we were given. The Minister of Finance is out by about $60 billion. Is this transparent?