Mr. Speaker, first, I would like to say that I will be sharing my time with the member for Lotbinière—L'Érable.
Prebudget consultations are held every year. However, they are even more important this year. In fact, there is a very important issue at stake in health care between the federal government and the provinces. There will be a first ministers' meeting about the issue at the beginning of January.
During this meeting, the provinces will attempt to convince the federal government to reinvest in health, perhaps not as much as it did when the Canada Health Act was passed in the late 1970s, but at least as much as Mr. Romanow suggested, which is 25%. Right now the government is only investing 14%. This is the context in which this meeting will take place.
Before beginning my comments, since these are prebudget consultations, I would like to highlight the remarkable effort and talent of our finance critic in recent years. His forecasts have consistently been better than those of the former Minister of Finance, who aspires to be the next Prime Minister. In the last three years alone, the latter has been off in his budget forecasts by 300%.
We were hoping that the current Minister of Finance would be better. Obviously, this will be his first official budget, likely in February. We will see at that time. However, already in his prebudget forecasts, we can see that he suffers from the same propensity—I dare not use a stronger word—as the former Minister of Finance, which is the propensity to hide the surplus somewhat.