Madam Speaker, I certainly appreciate the comments regarding the valuation of our Canadian dollar as it is now at parity or slightly above, not just for manufacturing but certainly for raw resources, such as the fishery on the east coast and the forestry. As we get an appreciation in price of a particular species it seems that many factors negate that value coming back to the fishermen and certainly one of those is the value of the Canadian dollar.
A headline I read this morning said that finding $4 billion to cut from the federal government's $80 billion in program expenses is “no big deal”, our finance minister said Tuesday.
Of course it is not a big deal because it has not been done yet. I suspect it is going to be a much bigger deal as time goes by and the cuts need to be made.
I would like to specifically ask the member, in light of the large deficit that we have and in order to get to that balanced budget figure by 2014, how he would propose the government do that?