Mr. Speaker, I find it interesting how the member tries to rewrite history to a certain degree.
A couple of years after Paul Martin left the Prime Minister's Office, we were into this huge global crisis, and he is trying to take credit for Canada being a global economic leader.
The reality of the situation is that the banking industry is a world leader because Prime Minister Chrétien and his cabinet resisted bank mergers during the 1990s.
In terms of converting a trade surplus and a budget surplus into deficits, Paul Martin had the surpluses and the Prime Minister converted them into huge deficits.
This particular bill has very little to do with the actual budget. It is only a small portion of it that is actually critically important to the budget. My question to the member is: Why did the government choose to have such a huge budget bill when in fact most of it is irrelevant to the actual passage of the budget itself?