Mr. Speaker, one of the things I think we would all agree on in the House of Commons is that we all want to debate issues and priorities and in which direction we want to take the country. Every party has a different perspective and independents have different perspectives and that is healthy.
One of the things that I have seen is just terrible in terms of democracy, and we were supposed to have some reform today but it was vacant again. It is the mere fact that we do not, as parliamentarians, have any type of genuine accounting in terms of the resources that are available to Parliament to make decisions in the country.
I am talking about the fact that the government continues to play the game of saying it has no money one week and the next week it has lots of money, then it has no money again and then it is going to find some by looking through the books. How many years after 10 years in government do the Liberals have to look through the books and find more billions of dollars, all in a manner of moments? That is not right. What we should be doing is understanding our finances, understanding the ability and time when the money is coming in and debating intelligently on how we want to spend it. That is fair.
I was very disappointed that the throne speech had a number of different promises, suggestions and platitudes but it did not address the principal fact that we have a problem right now. The Prime Minister was $40 billion off in his financial projections. That is not democratic. That is a huge deficit there. It does not matter if it is actually stealing money from workers and using it later on for other situations. The reality is we as parliamentarians need to make educated decisions about those resources.
How does the hon. member feel about the fact that we did not get that reform or commitment in the Speech from the Throne and what does that do for the Prime Minister's democratic reform platform?