Mr. Speaker, the member opposite is articulating the frustration that we cannot run the government like we run a business, that we cannot run the government like one might run a household, where there is a budget and we plan. But when running a household, one can predict reasonably how much money is going to come in the front door, at least over the next few months.
The government starts budgeting for the fiscal year in the autumn of the preceding year. It takes 18 months before we get through the whole thing. We cannot predict major bankruptcies. We cannot predict the failures of businesses. If a business does not make any money, we do not get any taxes. What if someone defaults or leaves Canada or there is some catastrophic event where we have to spend money? It is very difficult to predict all of those things, and when dealing with a trillion dollar economy, a few million bucks is really just pocket change in that envelope.
We do not just hire people to predict; we actually rely on independent third party non-governmental agencies to make these predictions and they are as good as it gets. That is the financial industry we are looking at. They say we cannot get it right but do not seem to mind at all that we err on the side of not having a deficit. They like that, Canadians like that, and we are going to stay there until we find a better way to predict what our bottom line is going to be.