Mr. Speaker, as I said earlier, the Minister of Finance is a stranger to the truth. We have seen a lot of this fiction from the government since it has taken power and indeed it is fiction. The government, in putting out its message, tends to talk about monies that it has spent. It may be monies it has booked but it certainly has not spent the monies. I think that is my hon. friend's point.
Even setting that aside, the problem now is that the Prime Minister has no plan. The Prime Minister at the earliest claims that he will begin to respond to the economic crisis in some as yet unclear manner, and not this year but next year. We have had two months of no action. For two months the economy has been without direction nor has there been the acknowledgement that the federal government will do the job it should and bring forward assistance. Those are the facts. That is the reality.
The Conservatives talk about spending. They announce spending. I have had that happen in my own riding. Everyone knows the beef and hog industry is in trouble. The Conservatives announced $6 million, and we appreciated that at the time, for assistance in terms of a plant in Prince Edward Island. However, 18 months later, only a dribble of that money came out.
That is not what it takes. Talking about it is not going to stimulate the economy. Government action and real dollars will stimulate the economy. That is what we need from the government, not rhetoric, not an ideological agenda, not an attack on pay equity and labour unions, not an attack on the political process. What we need is economic action and dollars going into the economy, whether it is in infrastructure, the automobile industry, the manufacturing industry, the fisheries industry, the forestry industry, or securing seniors' pensions.
That is what we need. We need some action and some real money. That will stimulate the economy and it will help. There will still be difficult times. We do not need to just talk about it. We need to see the plan. The government should lay it out and let us get with it.