Mr. Speaker, let us talk about British Columbia and how this budget was so untruthful on the funding for B.C.'s Asia Pacific gateway project.
In the 2006 budget, the Conservatives cut the Liberal funding by hundreds of millions of dollars in the first five years. In this budget, the finance minister partly restored the funding that he had cut the year before, then added $450 million in new funding and hailed it as proof that B.C. is somehow a big winner. The problem is that B.C. will not start receiving the new money until four years from now.
After studying the budget in detail and reviewing the responses from across the nation, I can only agree with most analysts that the Conservatives' 2007 budget is very divisive, unfair, unjust, untrue and irresponsible.