Mr. Speaker, I will begin by saying that we certainly hear our share of outrageous comments in the House.
We have not had a budget since the last election. It has been more than a year. The good news is that in today's economic statement, the government announced that it will present a budget in the spring. We look forward to that. We have been asking for one for a long time.
This summer the government provided an update that ended up being nothing but a snapshot of where we stood, what money had been spent so far, how big the deficit was and what the projections were. It was a useful document, but it lacked a vision and a plan for the future.
We thought that today's statement would finally give us what we wanted. After all, budgets are important in Parliament and are ideally presented once a year. There is often an update in the fall to brief us in the meantime.
At present, the government is going into debt and putting taxpayers and the public in debt as never before. Since it is providing no budget documents, or very few, we had pinned much hope on the document presented today. It contains a lot of good ideas, but unfortunately, we will have to wait until spring to see anything concrete. That is what the document says. It is a little late, and it is disappointing.
There are two fundamental elements that are important to the Bloc Québécois. We have a number of demands that would address certain needs, and they are not very complicated. Our job is to go see citizens, households, families, businesses and all the organizations working in society. These people tell us what they need and what problems they are having. Our job is to collect all this information, to represent them and to deliver their message. We want to be the voice of these individuals and businesses.
If there is one predominant issue that all Quebeckers agree on, it is funding for health care. That is the case across the country, not just in Quebec. On the eve of the throne speech, all the provinces agreed that better funding for health care was needed. We are in the midst of a full-blown pandemic, a public health crisis, and this document has nothing, or just about nothing, for health.