Mr. Speaker, I will start by answering the question about the balanced budget.
Indeed, a large part of the balanced budget this government brags about so much comes from sources that were not recommended in pre-budget consultations.
The first source is the EI surplus, which was about $1.8 billion. Since the surplus announced by the government is just $1.4 billion, it had to take the $1.8 billion from the EI surplus and add it to the consolidated revenue fund, even though the Finance Minister's predecessor, Jim Flaherty, had said that the government would never use the EI surplus to finance a balanced budget.
The second source is the contingency fund—not just this year's fund, which went from $3 billion to $1 billion, but the fund for the next two years as well. This measure was not recommended in the pre-budget consultations either. No one made that suggestion.
The third source is the early sale of GM shares, worth $3.1 billion. You have to add the $2 billion to this $3.1 billion. I said “early sale” because the government lost a lot of money on these GM shares. If it had waited just one more week to sell them, it would have made $100 million more.
At the end of the day, we are talking about nearly $7 billion taken from these three sources to achieve this balanced budget.