Mr. Speaker, in December 2005, the Prime Minister gave a speech in Quebec City in which he promised to put an end to domineering and paternalistic federalism by monitoring federal spending power. He even condemned some of the previous government's centralizing policies, such as the social union agreement.
When the Prime Minister stated in his Speech from the Throne that he wants to “place formal limits on the use of the federal spending power for new shared-cost programs”, is he not simply rehashing the social union agreement that was decried by the National Assembly?