Mr. Speaker, as the remarks of the parliamentary secretary made abundantly clear, this is a dishonest budget. It is a visionless budget. It is a mean-spirited budget that tries in a blatant way, and it will be unsuccessful, to play to the Conservative political base.
I think few things are more important than basic honesty. As a constituent from Brandon—Souris discovered on budget day, the budget contains a lie. It says that his income tax rate will go down when in fact it will go up. Whatever the dollar amounts involved, that is irrelevant compared to the basic honesty of a budget document and speech which is entirely lacking from the basic point that it said the tax is going down when the tax is going up. Nothing else matters except for the budget which does not tell the truth. There are other ways in which this is a dishonest budget.
The Indian affairs minister stands in question period in his sanctimonious way and defends his funding to aboriginals when a finance official said only in the last couple of days that the government will have five billion additional dollars, approximately, as a consequence of its reneging on the Kelowna accord. The Conservatives did it. It is confirmed by the officials and they do not admit it. That is dishonest.
They have reneged on the Canada-Ontario agreement. They have reneged on the EnerGuide program, which is a highly efficient program and which really hit one low income individual who had already committed to $3,000 and the government is not following through.
In terms of the point my colleague made, it is disingenuous of this budget to ignore the $100 billion tax cuts delivered in 2000. The Conservatives say that the Liberal government would not deliver over a period of five years. Every penny of that $100 billion has been delivered to Canadians in lower tax cuts. That is a fact. Check the budget documents. Therefore, it is wrong to say that the Conservative government has given more tax relief than the Liberals did.
If the numbers are calculated correctly, one will find that in the years since the government balanced its budget in 1997, the Liberal government tax relief amounted to $16 billion per year as opposed to this budget's $6 billion per year. Those are facts. The $16 billion has been delivered. It is not a fiction and so I think the Conservative government is once again being disingenuous with this dishonest budget.
The Conservatives are breaking promises. Many Canadians were looking forward to capital gains relief. Nowhere is that to be seen in this budget.