Mr. Speaker, first, I would like to thank the member for his comments. Of course, I do not agree what everything he said. However, I believe there is a lot of common ground.
I would like to ask him two very specific questions. I would like to know if he considers, as I do, that the February 18 budget is a budget that throws money around indiscriminately. We see that it contains 74 expenditure measures, 14 tax measures and that none of these gets our attention. I would like to know if the member agrees that, in this budget, a lot of money has been thrown around without really solving an essential and priority problem for Canadians and Quebeckers.
Second, I would like the member to tell me—he referred to employment insurance premiums--whether he considers that it is normal, or totally abnormal, that, this year again, at $2.10 per $100 of insurable earnings, the employment insurance fund will rake in a surplus of $2.8 billion, as the Minister of Human Resources Development confirmed yesterday. This will bring the debt accumulated by the federal government with people paying into employment insurance to almost $45 billion. Is it normal that the government has used EI premiums to pay down a part of the federal debt?