Madam Speaker, I would like to thank my colleague from the Bloc, the finance critic, who has made a good intervention this morning. He did talk quite a bit about the previous finance minister and what his practice was, it seems, of not being very good at accounting. He talked about the employment insurance surplus that year after year has built up a tremendous amount of money for the federal government. Even in this current year there is $3 billion more collected than what is required by the chief actuary. This surplus has been built up to something like $35 billion over the term of the former finance minister.
There is also the matter of the foundations that the former finance minister funded, of which the auditor general is very critical, with essentially over $7 billion in off book foundations.
As well, there is the practice of underplaying or lowballing the federal revenues in his budget to always make it look like he is doing better than he had projected. In this current year it looks like there will be a $7 billion to $10 billion surplus. The finance minister had projected $1.5 billion. It seems to me that was a practice that the former finance minister engaged in. I am not sure what he was trying to do. Perhaps it was to build up funds for an election year or his own campaign or whatever.
Again, it seems to me that it goes with this whole problem the government has of problems with calculations made by Revenue Canada and with overpayments, this current matter we are discussing today. If the federal finance minister and his department cannot run the department in a better fashion than that, is that not really a serious problem we have here in Canada?