Madam Speaker, a Liberal member is yelling yes. I have to tell him that Canadians do not believe the Liberals when they say that because the reality is the opposite. The reality is that we cannot trust the Liberal words even when they appear to be addressing the concerns of Canadians.
Let me reference the most egregious example of this kind of untruthful presentation to Canadians. It has to do with the so-called fifty-fifty splitting of any budgetary surplus promised by the Liberals in previous election documents, speeches from the throne, and budgets. Fifty-fifty they told us back in 1997. They said that if there was any budgetary surplus, it would be split. Fifty per cent would go toward program spending to deal with the fact that the Liberal government had cut the heck out of our social programs and national infrastructure, and the other 50% would go toward tax cuts and debt reduction. That was going to be the recipe from the Liberal government.
Some of us had concerns with that fifty-fifty proposition as it was because we had seen since 1993 Canadians take the brunt of the government's cuts to social programs, health care, education, housing, the environment, just name it. We felt that when there was a surplus it was time for the government to balance out the situation and ensure that we were able to take the benefits accrued to Canadians because of our tightening of the belt and put it toward those programs.
We expected a slightly different balance, but even if one accepted the fifty-fifty proposition, we did not get it. What did we get? We got 10%, if we were lucky, toward program spending and dealing with the deep cuts that the Liberals had engineered, and 90% for debt reduction and tax cuts. We are dealing with a double whammy here, inaccurate forecasting of information to begin with and then broken promises and empty rhetoric by the Liberal government itself.
Those are the first two questions we have to ask in the estimates debate. The third is, have Canadians been consulted? Is the budget process and the estimates that we are dealing with today a culmination of Canadians' expectations and feelings?