Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I, too, would like to take this opportunity to make some brief comments on our budget. I think there is widespread recognition of fiscal belt-tightening which will have to take place, resulting from Canada's current fiscal situation. I think in yesterday's federal budget, we got a clear indication of some of the hits that the territories will take. I know that in the past couple of years, the territories have already taken some pretty hard hits in terms of funding for social housing and funding for languages. The provinces are going to get hit harder as time goes on, but I think people have to remember that this government started taking hits a couple of years ago. It's been getting tougher and tougher all the time.

Like Mr. Koe, I would like to give some credit where credit is due. I don't think we should point the fingers of blame for reduced funding from the federal government at Mr. Pollard. I think Mr. Pollard has done a terrific job of managing the negotiations with Canada. I think he has done the best that anybody could have done in a difficult time. Having said that, I must say that I'm disappointed that Mr. Pollard chose to introduce a deficit budget.

I think we have to be very careful, given our limited potential to raise our own funds, that we don't get into the position that Canada has gotten into. We don't want to have to make those dramatic decisions to cut a significant number of civil servants in order to have any hope of dealing with a deficit. We need to stay away from accumulated deficits. I recognize, Mr. Speaker, that it is not always possible, on a year-to-year basis, to avoid a deficit. We will have years when we will have tremendous forest fire problems and there are always going to be situations that arise like that. But, we have to make sure we are setting up a financial structure that doesn't have a deficit built into it.

In order to do that, one of the things that we have to seriously consider, as the Standing Committee on Finance has indicated, is legislation to ensure that there is no accumulated deficit by the time the next government ends.