Mr. Speaker, the good news is that now we have a government in Quebec with which we can actually work, a government that has indicated, as has the Minister of Finance, that they are looking forward to working with Mr. Séguin.
The fact is that there will always be issues between the federal government and the provinces, but working in a collaborative manner is very important. Therefore we obviously are pleased to hear that the minister in Quebec indicated very strongly that he will work with the Minister of Finance.
The member says that we are leaderless, that we are adrift. If the member were correct, I would hate to see if we did, because the 2003 budget deals with health care funding, infrastructure, child poverty, and a vast array of issues, but still continues to have no deficit. We have had six balanced budgets or better.
The member talks about infrastructure issues, yet what I cannot understand and what I have not heard is that if there is an imbalance, as the member says, why is it that the provinces have the same fiscal capacity as the federal government? If there is a problem then maybe Quebec, certainly under the PQ it preferred to blame us rather than work with us, maybe the PQ should have looked at its own fiscal house and dealt with that issue. We know the problem the PQ had because of course it left the cupboard bare: $4 billion. Obviously it did not have a lot of money. I do not know what the PQ did with it.
The PQ talked about moneys from the federal government and yet it sat on $600 million from the federal government because it did not want to spend it on areas upon which it thought we were imposing. However the PQ sat on it and still said, like the little boy in Oliver Twist , “Please, sir, give us more”. It is very odd.
In this case I do not know how the member could stand and say what he did, given the shabby treatment that the PQ handed out to the municipalities in Quebec. Without the support of the Government of Canada and the national infrastructure program, more than half the improvements in cities in Quebec would not have occurred. At least the PQ had the sense to sign on even if it did cause a lot of difficulty for the municipal governments.