Mr. Speaker, my colleague is quite right. For 13 years, the Liberal government did not even recognize the existence of a fiscal imbalance, and the Liberal Party still does not recognize it. They refuse to admit that there is a fiscal imbalance. People say that Quebec and the provinces have been hard hit by this, but it is really the people of Quebec and the provinces who have suffered. We cannot say that it is just the provinces and so we do not really care. People have gone without services because of the imbalance between the constitutional obligations of the federal and provincial governments and their respective revenues.
Even though the Conservative Party, for its part, recognizes that there is an imbalance in the federation, it does not really see that the imbalance is fiscal in nature. The fix it provided in the last budget took the form of cash transfers. This means that, every year and for every budget, Quebec is ultimately at the mercy of the ideological and political choices that the federal government may make in light of the political situation at the time, regardless of whether the Conservatives, the Liberals, or some other party is in power.
That is the nub of the problem. That is why Quebeckers of all political stripes in the National Assembly, regardless of whether they are Liberals, ADQ or Parti Québécois, are demanding a genuine fiscal solution. That was the thrust of the Séguin commission which asked, for example, that the GST be transferred to the provinces. Equalization would have to be re-worked, of course, if the direct transfers to the provinces were cut by this much. If there is a tax transfer to the provinces, however, they will have stable, predictable revenues over which they have full control and which are not subject to every whim of the federal government.
This is really the nub of the issue. The Liberals have never even acknowledged the existence of a fiscal imbalance, and even though the Conservatives acknowledge it in theory, they still do not understand the real nature of it. We are working hard to get this fixed in the next budget.