Madam Speaker, I was referring to the name of the agreement, and that is its name, naturally. It is a compound name, the name of the agreement. True, it may not deserve its own name, nor having a lot of time and thought focussed on it. But that is its name.
So the leader of the NDP was on the losing end with this agreement. Unfortunately for him, his party members are going to suffer as a result, because they are going to become pseudo-leftist Liberals for the time it takes for one campaign. We all know that the Liberals pass themselves off as leftist when campaigning, but then govern on the right, by taking the money of the unemployed—a huge amount of money moreover—or the money that belongs to seniors—I am thinking here of my colleague from Saint-Maurice—Champlain. So that party has balanced its budget at the expense of the least disadvantaged.
This is a government that is going to invest heavily in the armed forces, that is going to govern in such a way as to generate huge surpluses which will be concealed so as to put them into the debt without debate. It will hide the $3.4 billion surplus at CMHC while 1.7 million of our fellow citizens are experiencing housing problems.
So this is a government that governs blithely on the right, listening to its little friends, its little lobbies, and using its little strategies, and, in an election situation, flirts with its NDP friends, who are always falling for their tricks.
I think that the same thing happened in a minority government in 1974—I may be off a year or two—where they lost half of their members following this type of agreement with a bigger and more cunning fish—