Mr. Speaker, the hon. member has been very active on the G8 and G20 spending file, perhaps one of the greatest misappropriations of public tax dollars in the history of the country.
I remember that now infamous fall 2008 economic statement where the finance minister claimed there would be a $100 million surplus. In a federal budget, $100 million is almost a rounding error. The only way he was able to reach that minuscule little baby surplus was to sell off $10 billion of assets. I remember day after day we asked the minister to produce a list of the assets that the government was going to sell. He never presented that list of assets because there was no list of assets. The government had effectively created this notion that there was going to be an asset disposal. It never created a list.
As a minister of public works in the past, I know it takes about two years to go from having a list of assets to actually implementing a sale. The government made up those figures to try to pretend it had a surplus and in fact it did not.
The member is quite right. It is very hard to have faith in the government's budget numbers or projections.