Souris-Moose Mountain MP Doctor Robert Kitchen didn’t sugarcoat his opinion on the federal budget delivered in Ottawa on Tuesday.

“This is all staged to be a cover-up,” Kitchen said, alluding to the SNC-Lavalin scandal. “This is a government that campaigned on only a couple of $10 billion deficits in 2015, for three years, and balancing the budget this year.”

The projections from the federal government show the budget will carry a deficit over $10 billion until 2023-24, which Kitchen said is quite incredible. He described the budget as spending as much as they can to attract votes.

As for impacts in the southeast corner of Saskatchewan, he pointed to three ways the budget will have a negative impact on his riding.

The first was the impacts on the agriculture sector thanks to the ongoing spat with China, which has now carried over to the canola market.

“They have huge decisions to make on where they’re going to go,” Kitchen said, referencing the work which will need to be done in selling existing canola, and what to seed for the coming year with seeding season fast approaching.

The other area he noted was neglected by the federal budget was the oil and gas sector. The budget called for money to be spent on the consultations for pipeline construction, with no money set aside, and no action plan for the actual construction of a pipeline.

The third item which he pointed out was the skills training benefit included in the budget.

“That doesn’t even come into effect until 2020, and how is that going to help our power workers and our coal miners who are looking at being told by this government that they’re going to phase out coal by 2030,” Kitchen asked.

Kitchen said the Conservatives will continue to go through the budget page by page, and line by line, to make sure there is no other legislation the government is trying to slip through. The votes were continuing throughout the night Wednesday and were expected to start to wrap up Thursday.