Mr. Speaker, to answer my colleague's first question on the advantages to Quebec in this budget with respect to equalization, the new budget ensures that Quebec will get $185 million more than it did last November, if we look at the state of public finances at the time. If we compare this to the previous budget of the former Liberal government, Quebec will receive $741 million more. This is quite advantageous.
As far as the fiscal imbalance is concerned, we are turning over a new leaf to resolve it. It should be noted that in our budget, the budget of the new government, in 2005-06, there is an $8 billion surplus, but we also have non-allocated surpluses. In an effort to be transparent, we are thereby showing all Canadians that the surpluses that were not allocated in our budget can be allocated to resolve the fiscal imbalance, resolve problems of productivity, problems the environment might cause, problems in several sectors. These non-allocated surpluses represent $600 million for this year and $1.4 billion for next year. This bodes well for the negotiations to resolve the fiscal imbalance.