Mr. Speaker, is it not interesting that we have a Cape Breton member standing today and defending the Conservative government and its whole agenda of ignoring the needs of the member's own region and choosing to put all of its money in one basket as opposed to dealing with some very pressing problems in the Atlantic region, especially in Cape Breton?
I find it absolutely incredible that the member from Cape Breton would stand in this House and name-call and get personally insulting by making innuendoes about someone's style of speaking. I happen to think it is far more important to speak with integrity and passion than to speak with two faces and talk double-cross. It shows that he has absolutely no interest in fixing this problem.
I want to mention to the member that his government had the chance to fix this problem but it chose to put $80 billion in surplus revenue against the debt, which hardly changed our debt to GDP ratio one iota. All the while, the people in his region and his province were suffering under high unemployment and economic despair.
All we are saying is that we should take a portion of that money, a couple of billion dollars, and put it toward fixing the equalization formulation as the Liberals had the chance to do in 2003.
I want to remind the member that in the 2003 negotiations we were compelled by the five year legislative review requirement. The provinces and territories brought a consensus position to the table calling for a return to the 10 province standard; the inclusion of provincial revenues, including user fees, in equalization calculations; the minimizing of unpredictable factors; the forgiveness of census related losses; and the taking into account of any dramatic changes to provincial and territorial tax bases. There was a consensus with Quebec, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland and Labrador, British Columbia and all the other provinces. His government refused to move on this because of what it would cost, which was a few million dollars extra that it said it could not afford. However, it did have $80 billion to put against the debt while the roof was leaking.