Thank you very much, Madam Chair.
You will not be surprised to hear that I support my colleague's amendment, for various reasons.
First of all, a budget is indeed very important. It is so important in fact that we have to take the time we need to prepare it properly. Asking for a budget to be tabled within four days, as our Conservative Party colleagues are doing, makes absolutely no sense. So we will take the time we need to present a budget to Canadians, but not any longer than we need, and we certainly could not do it in four days.
There are a number of reasons for that, the main one being the current context. My colleague, the member for Mirabel, said that, in another life, I presented a budget quickly after an election, but the current context is completely different from the one in 2014. It is marked by tremendous uncertainty brought on by the ill-considered, cavalier and ultimately unproductive actions of our neighbour and biggest economic partner, the United States. So it would have been ill-advised for us to rush to table a budget as quickly as our colleagues have been demanding in the past few days.
I do not have the exact date, but there will be a budget in the fall, and all those matters will be addressed at that time.
Furthermore, our colleagues from the Conservative Party have repeatedly raised the issue of inflation. As I think I said once in the House, the inflation we have seen since 2022—