Mr. Speaker, I found the speech by my colleague across the way very interesting. Frankly, I find it just astonishing that the government members are actually justifying this budgetary process, this ad hoc budgetary process that has been put together. We have the budget introduced on February 23, full of all of their priorities, and we have the budgetary implementation bill, Bill C-43.
I would remind members of this House, because now they are criticizing the Conservative Party for not being a responsible opposition, that on the initial budget we abstained as a caucus because we felt that we should allow the budget to go through and then review the items item by item. In fact, even on Bill C-43 we had agreed that the budget implementation bill should go to committee. We asked that the CEPA amendments be removed. Our understanding was that the government was going to remove the CEPA amendments and allow it to go to committee and we would deal with it there.
There, hopefully, we would have taken on things like the Atlantic accord and we would have been able to implement them right away. On issues or items where we disagree, we could have disagreed. That is the way a responsible opposition party works.
What happened is that then the Prime Minister got together with the leader of the NDP, and now here we have the budget bill, here we have Bill C-43 and here we have $4.6 billion in spending on two sheets of paper. That is $4.6 billion in spending, with the finance minister completely reversing his earlier position, something unprecedented in the history of this country. It is so unprecedented that I would like to quote the finance minister's warning back to him. This is from the Saskatoon StarPhoenix . The finance minister himself stated:
You can't go on stripping away piece by piece by piece of the budget....
You can't, after the fact, begin to cherry pick: “We'll throw that out and we'll put that in, we'll stir this around and mix it all up again”. That's not the way you maintain a coherent fiscal framework.
If you engage in that exercise, it is an absolute, sure formula for the creation of a deficit.
The finance minister and the Prime Minister did exactly what the finance minister said he was not going to do on this. Somehow the Liberal members are standing up and justifying this in the face of what their own finance minister said. The fact is that the finance minister, after this embarrassment of a budgetary process, should have to step down.
I would also caution the NDP members, because they signed this agreement. The leader of the NDP signed this agreement with the Prime Minister. Today our leader asked about the corporate tax cuts that are supposed to be removed. I would like to ask the members of the NDP to watch very carefully the responses from the finance minister and the Prime Minister about how “in the future” they are going to be removed.
I would also like the NDP members to be sure about any of these supposed spending increases they have asked for in this coalition. I do not think they are going to get them, because the finance minister has put in a hedge that it will not fall below a certain number before these spending increases take effect. Frankly, the NDP should talk to the members of the Liberal Party and talk to the finance minister and get it on paper, because I do not think that commitment is worth what it is written on.
Beyond the whole ad hoc process here, here is what this has done. Frankly, as finance minister, the Prime Minister, and I will even admit this, actually had somewhat of a reputation in the business community as someone who seemed to be a prudent fiscal planner. He had two year rolling projections.