Madam Speaker, as usual the Finance minister's assistant is talking through his hat.
Any confusion is coming from his side. It will not be easy to fool those who just completed their income tax returns. Canadians know very well that a lone parent family with one dependant and an income of $30,000 a year is still paying a lot of income taxes to the federal government and that the federal income tax impoverishes this family already living below the poverty line. He will not fool those people.
If he thinks that Canadians are all stupid, he should think again, especially since the income tax period only just ended. Canadians just filed their income tax returns. They cannot be fooled because they know what they paid in income tax. That is the first thing.
The second thing is that, talking about these great tax reductions, he said—he was honest enough to say so—“within four years”, not right now. The surplus is there. Does anyone know how much has accumulated in the federal government's coffers in the first 11 months of the last fiscal year? Twenty billion dollars, and the Minister of Finance is committed to put $15 billion into the debt payment. He is forgetting the other priorities.
It is fine to pay off the debt, we are all for that. But to put all the money in there, while there are huge needs in the health sector and in the fight against poverty, I cannot take this.
He is having discussions with the provinces about social housing. Let us look at that. Do people know what the government wants to do? It wants to leave the old stock of social housing to the provinces, with maintenance costs, but not one cent for investing in social housing. It is easy to pass the buck that way.
The forecasting errors—I did not want to raise them, but he did. Do people know for how long the Bloc Quebecois, with a small team of two or three people and a small portable computer, has been doing the estimates, the forecasts for the deficit and the surplus? Since 1995. Do people know what the margin of error in our forecasts has been from year to year? Three per cent, a normal forecasting error.
What kind of error margins did the Minister of Finance and the Liberal representative who just spoke have in their forecasts? Between 130% and 400% recently, a 3% margin of error in our forecasts as opposed to between 130% and 400%. Where is the confusion? Where is the inability to forecast the surplus, or rather, the deliberate way of hiding the truth, the real numbers, from the population?
This does not come from the Bloc Quebecois. It comes from the government. So, before telling us what to do and saying any odd thing to the population, who knows how much taxes it is paying to the federal government, I would urge my colleague to reflect further.