That is a good question, Mr. Speaker. Who was the Minister of Finance? It was the individual who aspires to be prime minister of the country, who is going around now telling people of his great fiscally responsible management program in which he will become involved once he becomes the Prime Minister of Canada. Here we have an individual who sat around the table as the then minister of finance, had it in his own hands for a 10 year period and never did what was fiscally responsible in this country.
As I have said, this vortex sucks up every single bit of taxpayers' money and then spits it out at the other end in meaningless programs. There was probably not one single Liberal backbencher who did not get something in the budget. There was probably not a Liberal caucus hand in the air that did not get something from the Minister of Finance in these days when the Liberals are a whole lot more concerned about the Liberal leadership race and who is going to be the next leader than they are about the future of the economy and the country.
Did the Minister of Finance, who is now aspiring to be the leader of the country, ever think for a moment of the poor in this country? Did he ever think for a moment about a promise that I believe was made back about 15 years ago here in the House, a promise that we would eliminate child poverty by the year 2000? The year 2000 is long gone and the government still fails to recognize that children in poverty come from families in poverty. Most of the programs that the government has implemented over the years have done very little to help people in poverty in this country or to eliminate child poverty. Another area is seniors. We have a government that is so arrogant that it actually does seniors out of their GST money. If they do not actually apply for it, the government will not make them aware that they are entitled to it. The government cares very little about seniors and it cares very little about the poor and child poverty in this country.
The government is proposing to help fund some of these new spending programs by reallocating a total of $1 billion a year from departments' and agencies' budget. That represents an amount equal to the amount that has been wasted so far on the failed long gun registry, $1 billion.