Mr. Speaker, I think sometimes it must be difficult to be Liberal members because I do not know if there is any road map or guide book that they are given when they join the Liberal Party. How do they keep track of who they are and what they stand for when it gets turned upside down all the time, inside out and backwards. It is like nailing Jell-O to a wall, in trying to grasp what they really stand for. Here they rail against the budget and now they are going to stand up and vote for it.
The member for Moncton—Riverview—Dieppe, whom I have great respect for, is far too good an MP to really believe some of the speaking notes he was given here to read when he walked in. As a former municipal politician, he would know that the way that the Conservatives crafted this particular budget makes it virtually impossible for a lot of municipalities to avail themselves of the spending. First, it was disingenuous when the government said it would be a 2% of GDP stimulus because that 2% contemplated the share of the province and the share of the municipality in the spending, so really it is like one-third of that in total stimulus.
Second, the mayor of Winnipeg has now said that he would have to borrow money or raise taxes to have the municipality avail itself of this stimulus. Frankly, it is not that easy to go out there and borrow billions of dollars on the open market, even if one has a good credit rating these days. The way it is structured and the strings that are attached to it in itself warrants voting against it. I think the coalition that we had contemplated could have put together a better package. There is a song that goes: Anything you can do I can do better. We could have done better.