Mr. Speaker, the hon. member is trying to put lipstick on a pig here. The government is running a deficit in the first three years, which will well exceed $100 billion. He is basically saying, “What a good boy am I”.
The hon. member presents his so-called economic action plan, and says it is a wonderful thing, and explains how we are going to get out of it. Of course, those who might be a little but more objective about this, such as the Parliamentary Budget Officer, say that essentially the government's plan is not costed well and it has a structural deficit.
He refuses to acknowledge it and is unwilling to address the actual underlying differences between what the government projects as its expenditures and what it will receive as revenue.
Then the Conservatives compound the difficulties of their fiction plan with a $17.5 billion so-called savings measure, which on both the face of it and in the disproportionality of it seems to orient itself to saving money out of CIDA but not out of any other program. The defence department is easily Canada's largest program, and its contribution is less than $2.5 billion over the five years. Yet, CIDA's is $4.5 billion over the same five years.
I wonder if the hon. member can tell the House this. What kind of a statement does this make about the government, that its so-called expected savings are more than twice as high out of official development assistance than they are out of defence? In proportionate terms, that is a 2% contribution from defence as opposed to a 20% to 25% contribution from foreign aid. What does that say about the government?