Madam Speaker, there is a habit the government has that if opposition members do their job, we are attacked as traitors, as being seditious, and called 21st century Neville Chamberlains, anything it can throw at us. However, our job is to ensure accountability.
When it comes to accountability, in November the government told us there was no recession. It was going to have a surplus. It said that if we voted for the coalition, we would end up with $30 billion in spending and how could we justify that. Two months later the Conservatives said that not only do we have $30 billion in spending they need to get out right now, but they will have another $3 billion fund that is not going to have any oversight and it has to get out immediately. What happened to the great surplus that was supposed to have been there in November? It disappeared.
We are being asked to trust the government on blind faith, yet its record, in terms of its partisan spending is, as the Toronto Star said, extremely shoddy.
There is no confidence in terms of the government. The Conservatives attack us every time. They do not want to work with anybody. They seem to prefer to play to their base. Yet the issue at hand is whether or not we give the government a blank cheque to spend $3 billion without any accountability to Parliament. At the end of the day, our responsibility is to go back to our voters and tell them how that money was spent. That money has to be spent accountably.
If the member cannot deal with the fact that there has to be accountability, I think he has a problem and he probably does not deserve to be in government.