Mr. Speaker, the questions I had in mind kind of piled up as my hon. colleague continued to speak, so I will try to roll them out and see what she says.
My first comment is that the budget and the minister have ignored the effects of inflation on the budget. If we look at the tri-council budget, it is about $33 billion, which means that with 1% to 2% inflation rate, which it has been in the last few years, that is $30 million to $60 million of lost purchasing power. She mentioned the funds that were announced in the budget. First, we will have to wait an extra year to them and they do not even cover inflation.
The second thing is that she talked about a balanced budget, but she did not talk about the fact that $2 billion were taken from the reserve. That $2 billion is what people who do computer programming call a magic number. It is just pulled out of nowhere without really good justification. If a different number had been chosen, would we have a budget surplus?
The third thing I would ask the minister is this. The budget assumes a future price of oil which does not agree with the real price in the market. If we believe in the market, if we believe that we are not smarter than the market, which is a good thing to do, we would use a much more conservative, lower future price for oil.