Mr. Speaker, I would like to ask one or two questions of the Bloc member.
First, he said that the Government of Canada is not sensitive to the needs of Quebec and the provinces with respect to equalization. I wish he had been honest enough to say, here in the House that, when provincial and territorial premiers met in Niagara-on-the-Lake, they had set the bar at $10.9 billion. Moreover, they wanted stable and predictable funding. This is exactly what the federal government did, at the request of the premiers. However, they decided to change their request when they saw that we had an additional surplus. This is what we are seeing in the newspaper today. The Premier of New Brunswick, Mr. Lord, tells us, “We have an additional amount of $100 million, but we will not overreact; we will act like a responsible government”.
This is exactly what we are doing here: we are acting like a responsible government. If the Parti Québécois had acted like a responsible government, it would not have increased the debt by $11 billion during its two mandates, by trying to introduce all kinds of programs that it could not afford. We are acting like a responsible government.
How can the member tell the public that we did not keep our promises when what the provincial premiers were asking for was $10.9 billion?