By 1993 he had left a $42 billion deficit to the Liberal government. That is his idea of a big step, from $38 billion to $42 billion. Some big step.
Our big step under our finance minister and our Prime Minister was to take that $42 billion deficit, reduce it to zero and turn it into surpluses.
If that is the kind of big steps the Tories like, I do not think we want to go back in that direction.
Not only that, but the hon. member totally mangles his facts. He talks about callous cuts to health care when in fact we had a $23 billion increase in health care over five years and $3 billion this year alone. He criticizes the government for no tax cuts when we had $100 billion in tax cuts last year. Business groups, such as the BCNI and the Chamber of Commerce, exclusively recommended no tax cuts in this budget.
My last point is on perhaps the worst offence because I thought the hon. member knew something about how budgets were done. The projected deficits or surpluses are not made by the government; they are made by economists. Not only are the economists not predicting deficits, but as was indicated in the budget speech, even if we take the average of the four most pessimistic economic forecasts, the government is not going back into deficit this year, next year or the year after.