Mr. Speaker, the minister is forgetting that the money is not his, it is the taxpayers'. Incidentally, a large part of that money comes from Quebec.
The minister is also forgetting that there is, when it comes down to it, only the one set of taxpayers. This year, given the Minister of Finance's surplus, it would have been easy for him to reduce federal taxes so as to allow the provinces to raise theirs, and thus to be able to finance their own initiatives within their own areas of jurisdiction, namely health, education and some other areas, without squeezing money out of the one and only taxpayer, who has to bear the brunt of the federal government's bungling.