Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to speak again about the budget tabled in this House earlier in the session.
Earlier today, during the previous two speeches, mention was made of the fiscal imbalance. That makes me laugh. I listened carefully to the speeches and did not get involved in the debate between the Liberals and the Conservatives on the fiscal imbalance, because the Liberals have always refused to admit that the fiscal imbalance exists and the Conservatives claim that it has been fixed.
Here is the Conservative technique for correcting the fiscal imbalance: the Minister of Finance gets up in the House and reads his budget. While reading, he simply says that the fiscal imbalance has now been corrected once and for all. That is all there is to it. The Conservatives believe that they just have to keep on repeating the same thing and it will come true.
This is not the case, however. Serving the public and doing the work we do in the House takes more than words: it takes action.
Let us review the basics of the fiscal imbalance. This concept was first defined and discussed in Quebec by the Séguin commission, which carefully examined the matter. This has always been a Bloc Québécois issue. At the time, only the Bloc talked about it; the other parties denied that it existed. We started explaining to the Conservatives what it was all about. We have made progress, but they still do not understand what it is all about because they claim to have solved it.
When the members of the Séguin commission defined the concept of fiscal imbalance, they did not pick a name for it out of a hat. They did not open the dictionary to a certain page and point to some words when they named it fiscal imbalance. It was not an arbitrary choice.
There were reasons. First, it is an imbalance. Second, the nature of this imbalance is fiscal. It was not a monetary or budgetary issue. Basically the central government, the federal government, had too much tax revenue, too great a fiscal capacity, in relation to the requirements and the jurisdictions established by the Constitution. On the other side, the governments of Quebec and of the other provinces do not have a large enough tax base to assume all the responsibilities provided for in said Constitution. This is so true that the federal government generates significant surpluses year after year and takes the liberty, with each budget—including the Conservative budgets, no matter what the Conservatives say—to meddle in the jurisdictions of Quebec and the provinces.
I would like to point out that if the federal government's fiscal capacity were not greater than its needs, it would not feel the need to interfere in provincial jurisdictions. In fact, it could not do so. Nonetheless, since it has too much fiscal capacity, too much money, it goes ahead and interferes in provincial jurisdictions. In the meantime, Quebec and the provinces do not have enough funding or a large enough tax base to meet all their needs. They are facing an increasingly precarious situation.
That is what is happening. The fiscal imbalance exists. The only solution to this fiscal imbalance is a tax transfer. This seems logical enough to me. I meet a lot of people in my riding. On the weekend I went to a sidewalk sale on Wellington Street in my riding to meet with people and talk to them. When I tell them we need to correct the fiscal imbalance with a tax transfer, almost everyone understands the principle quickly enough: fiscal imbalance and tax transfer seems logical enough to them.
The Conservatives are the only ones who do not understand, or at least not the Conservatives from Quebec. The Liberals and the New Democrats do not recognize the principle either, but the Conservatives have not really delivered the goods. They made a significant budgetary transfer; that is true. This will provide Quebec with supplementary sources of revenue. That is the reason we supported the budget. We have done our job.
The Bloc Québécois fought hard for this funding. The government has made progress and transferred funding to Quebec. We have decided to support the budget. This is a good illustration of the Bloc's importance. During the latest votes on the budget we noticed how quiet the Conservatives were when the Bloc Québécois voted in favour of their budget. They were well aware that they need us to make their Parliament work.
So there is no tax transfer in this budget. That is clear. In committee I asked the minister and his officials about this. Everyone admitted that there was no tax transfer. There were only budget transfers. What everyone also admitted was that nothing guarantees that this money will be there next year, or any other year. This is so true that the Conservative Party is even paying big bucks to advertise on television in Quebec, saying that if the Leader of the Opposition became prime minister, he could take back the money. By saying this, the Conservatives are admitting that this is not a permanent or definitive solution and that Quebec is still dependent on the federal government for this money. All Quebeckers, federalists and sovereignists alike, from all parties in the National Assembly, want to be free of this dependence. We want to be able to count on autonomous revenues and do not want to always be subject to the whims of the federal government.
The solution for Quebec is to get back either the tax fields—like the GST—or tax points, which will ensure stable, predictable revenues that will grow over time with the economy and will be fair and equitable.
In short, there are some benefits in this budget that are due to the fact that this is a minority government. It needed the support of the Bloc Québécois, because Quebeckers decided to send a strong contingent of members to Ottawa. The government had to give more resources to Quebec. We supported the budget, but the fiscal imbalance has not yet been corrected. There is still much work to be done, and we will continue to do what is necessary to defend the interests of Quebeckers.