Mr. Speaker, first I will excuse the parliamentary secretary who is perhaps not terribly familiar with the various governments in Quebec over the last 20 or 30 years. I would just like to inform him that the governing party that put Quebec back on track to a balanced budget was the Parti Québécois. I just wanted to point that out. It is important to correct him on this.
The problem is very simple and does not reside in the fact that a government has surpluses so long as they are properly budgeted for and are part of a budgetary framework for expenditures in particular sectors. If the budget calls for paying down the debt by—just as an example—$3 billion, that is fine.
But that is not what we have here. We have a system in which, year after year, this government's fiscal forecasts are nowhere close to the real numbers. It is a system that this government instituted in order to underestimate government revenues year after year. In this way, it can present itself as the great saviour with these unexpected surpluses. And if it thinks that it would be politically advantageous to spend money in a certain area, it can do so.
We say that it is unacceptable for this underestimation of surpluses, which we have seen for seven years, to become structural. That is where the problem lies.