Mr. Speaker, I have a lot of respect for the member. I know that he has a fine mind, but he is twisting himself into a pretzel to defend this legislation.
The fact is that he and his colleague, the Minister of Finance, defended the first budget bill as a perfect bill and a month later they are twisting themselves into pretzels, saying, “Whoops, we missed $4.6 billion. We are going to have to put this in”. It is a perfect budget now, they say, after they have changed it by $4.6 billion.
He talks about the issue of unplanned surpluses. The reality is that the finance minister in the last election stood up and criticized our party when he said that there was no way we could afford those things we talked about because the surplus was $1.9 billion. We all know what he said after the election. He said, “Whoops, I got that wrong too. It is actually $9.1 billion”. Maybe he is dyslexic and he got the numbers mixed up, but that shows what this government is doing with its own surpluses. It has no idea. That is one of the concerns: it has no idea in terms of fiscal forecasting.
Second, on the whole issue of “enabling legislation”, that is a euphemism. This is a $4.5 billion slush fund. That is what this is. After closely watching this government operate for 2000, I have absolutely no confidence whatever in its ability to manage or spend taxpayer dollars.
I will give another example of that. In the budget of February 23--