Mr. Speaker, I felt that I had to challenge the veracity of some of the comments made by my colleague.
In the introduction to my colleague's speech, he would have members believe that the reason he and his party were thrown out of office, still picking the feathers off their butt from being tarred and feathered and run out on a rail, was because the NDP kicked them out. For the record, it was actually the people of Canada who kicked them out. The reason they are now isolated in their shame and the reason they are sitting way over there isolated is because the people of Canada were well aware that they broke faith with the Canadian people. They lost their confidence and therefore they lost their jobs.
My colleague is living in some kind of state of denial if he thinks it was the NDP that kicked them out of office. In actual fact, the NDP members are doing their job as opposition MPs and criticizing the budget we are debating today, the budget implementation act. We oppose the bill and the budget and we are speaking against it in a constructive way.
Would my colleague not agree that if there were any opposition party on which we should be casting any blame, it would be the Bloc Québécois because five minutes after the budget was tabled in the House of Commons, the leader of the Bloc Québécois walked out of these chambers, stepped in front of a TV camera and said that he liked it and that he would vote for it? At that very moment all negotiations ended because in a minority Parliament the opposition parties could effect some fairly constructive positive changes if one of them did not bail out on the rest of us.
Would he not agree that if there is any choleric to be vented at this stage of the implementation of the budget, it should be directed toward the Bloc Québécois and its rampant self-interest?