Mr. Speaker, I am perfectly aware of that. The reality is that there is an imbalance, no matter what they choose to call it. There is too much money going into the federal coffers and not enough to the provinces compared to the respective needs. It is as simple as that.
Education and health are provincial. Instead of constantly trying to duplicate services, it would just be a matter of giving the money back to the people it belongs to, that is, to those whose mandate it is to deal with the matters under their jurisdiction.
The federal government is good at beefing up the bureaucracy. Once this new department is in place, with its 14,000 positions, it will have added close to 60,000 public servants in the past six years. At the same time, the total payroll has increased by close to $9 billion a year.
Rather than duplicate services, it would have been simpler to fix the fiscal imbalance and to hand back to each province the money that would enable it to solve its problems. It is unfortunate fact that the federal government has a predilection for putting its foot in everywhere and fattening up its bureaucracy instead of delivering services. That is something we see constantly.
In committee, we were presented with a study proving that things are going to get worse. The provinces are heading toward a serious deficit for the next 10 to 12 years, while the federal government will have hundreds of billions of dollars in surplus. That makes no sense, and the problem must be fixed. Regardless of the label put on it, this is, in our minds, fiscal imbalance. That is what it needs to be called and that is what, in fact, it is.