Mr. Speaker, I appreciate your attentiveness. I will certainly take your advice, as always.
Let me just say that the decision by my hon. colleague for South Shore—St. Margaret's was a deliberate decision. It was disappointing and it was deceitful.
Here is what the member for Cumberland—Colchester—Musquodoboit Valley said in 2004.
I call on the government to... just get down to the point and say, “We made a promise. Now we are going to keep it”.
Now he has changed his mind. He decided to say that the important thing was Nova Scotia could choose. I have already explained what this choice is about. It is not the deal we made. This choosing nonsense is not the deal that he and his colleagues insisted that our province deserved. That was disappointing, deceitful and deliberate.
In March of last year, the new finance minister, although after 15 months we can hardly call him new, said that equalization had been made a mess because of these deals with Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and Labrador. The Conservative members of Parliament from those two provinces made the decision, the deliberate decision to say nothing then. This is plain disappointing.
What is the part time ACOA minister saying today? The poor member for Central Nova is so despondent about this betrayal that there are unsubstantiated reports that he spent the weekend after the budget planting potatoes, but he got over it because when Nova Scotians said it was a betrayal—