Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the question and I want to say at the outset that under no circumstances should my comments be interpreted to suggest that I have less than full respect and admiration for the hundreds and hundreds of Canadians who participate regularly in the pre-budget consultation process.
My concern rests completely and solely with the federal Liberals who, on a regular basis, refuse to consider the deliberations and advice of Canadians. If that were the case, if it had been considered, we would not have seen in 2004 a privatization budget that moved and advanced the whole area of health care and other areas of public sector responsibility into the realm of private, for profit delivery. We would not have seen a budget that was so focused on tax cuts and so focused on debt reduction.
We would have seen a budget that tried to balance out spending on issues of importance to Canadians' health and well-being, coupled with some targeted, selective tax cuts that pertain to low income and middle income earners, with some planned allocation of resources toward the debt.
We would not have seen $9.1 billion in surplus from that budget go automatically against the debt. That is appalling. That is what Canadians object to.
I want the member for Mississauga South to take heed of some advice from the words of some experts who observe our committee and Parliament. Dobell and Ulrich, in their 2002 Policy Matters piece entitled “Parliament's Performance in the Budget Process: A Case Study”, observed:
The broad lines of the government's intentions were reasonably apparent in advance and there is no automatic connection between what a committee hears and what it recommends.
That was the case back in 2001. It is certainly still the case today.