Mr. Speaker, I want to address something the member for Etobicoke North raised in his speech that I think needs to be countered. It is in regard to his comments with respect to our government's plan in this budget to put Canada's fiscal federalism back on track.
When we became the government in 2006, we were left with quite the tangled set of arrangements with respect to fiscal federalism. Let me recount for members what actually happened.
In October 2004, the previous Liberal government, at a first ministers meeting chaired by the then prime minister, came up with this absurd idea that Canada was going to go to a fixed pot for equalization, that we were going to disconnect the equalization formula from any real world economic realities.
The government was going to go to this fixed pot of $10.9 billion a year that would grow at an annual rate, from there on in, of 3.5%, with absolutely no idea of how the government was going to apportion that new amount of money among the various provinces. There were no connections to real world economic realities. There were no connections to the 33 tax bases that the provinces use to collect their taxes.
Subsequent to that, the previous government negotiated these deals for the Atlantic accord and the Canada-Ontario May 2005 agreement that left the other provinces out of the loop, so we were left with the difficult job of trying to disentangle the arrangements of fiscal federalism, which we did.
I would say to the member opposite that he has a very rose-coloured view of the performance of the previous government with respect to fiscal federalism.