Mr. Speaker, here we are in an election year, and the Conservative government says we have a balanced budget. I do not believe that, quite frankly.
If we look at the government's balanced budget, what did it do? It borrowed out of the contingency fund—something that other ministers said they would never do to balance the books—and then it sold off $2 billion worth of GM shares in order to get a surplus of just over $1 billion.
That is a fudged balanced budget, and we will not know until after the next federal election whether or not it is, in fact, balanced.
A former speaker said we should just reflect on the Liberal provincial government. Would it not be better to reflect upon the last Liberal administration, when we had Jean Chrétien with balanced budgets and Paul Martin with balanced budgets? In fact, the Liberals handed the government the last balanced budget it actually had.
I wonder if the member might want to tell Canadians and her constituents whether she really believes that they do have a balanced budget that has actually been earned.