Madam Speaker, first of all, we are certainly going to vote to send it to committee. We do not want to see the bill defeated; we want to send it to committee. That is our job. Considering that the member was Speaker of the House himself for a brief moment, he is well aware that this needs to go to committee so that we can perform our parliamentary work with diligence.
Members will recall that we voted in support of this measure last April. What I am saying is that here, unlike Quebec City, we implemented and applied it. That is why we need to know where it stands.
Now, I may be mistaken. The member may be monitoring things even more closely than I am. All parties in the Quebec National Assembly have a plan to balance the budget, yet here we are talking about $5.3 billion while the government keeps digging itself into a deeper fiscal hole year after year. Trump is not the only cause. My colleague opposite saw that. The hole is getting deeper by the year.
If the federal government had a plan to return to a balanced budget, if public finances were healthier, if things had been managed differently in all the years since 2015, this would be an entirely different conversation. I think that the parties in Quebec City that are proposing this or other measures have included it in a comprehensive framework to fight poverty and help people with the cost of living. That is exactly what we are asking for. What we are saying is that it must be part of a whole. I think all the parties in Quebec City that are proposing this or other measures have made the effort.