Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. I couldn't agree more with Mr. Hoback on the issue of financial sustainability.
As our guests know, for the last 20 years the federal Department of Finance has been tracking the actual fiscal period returns—the actual end results--of NDP governments, Conservative governments, and Liberal governments. As Mr. Hoback I'm sure knows, NDP governments have come out at number one every single time. They balanced the budget and paid down debt. Mr. Hoback would be well-inclined to follow the NDP example.
I'm also very much in agreement with Mr. Hoback on the issue of wild and crazy financial expenditures. Mr. Page has certainly raised a concern with all of us that the government is going ahead with its massive billion-dollar prison scheme at a time when crime rates are falling, without any sort of economic or budgetary analysis on how much all this will cost. I would like to praise Mr. Page for having exposed the huge cost overruns in the F-35 fighter jets. I believe it's now at $29 billion and counting. Those are two examples of pretty crazy budgeting on behalf of this government.
I'd like to come to the question of the EI fund, because we have a situation here where you've flagged 100,000 Canadian families who are going to lose breadwinners over the next few months. Looking at your revenue and expenditure projections around the employment insurance fund, I would like you to confirm this. It seems to me that the changes being brought into employment insurance will result in surpluses starting the year after next of $1.5 billion, $4 billion, and then $6 billion. We're talking about a $12 billion surplus in EI. Benefits are going up, of course. The moneys coming into the Conservative government are skyrocketing.
This brings us back to the time when the former Liberal government did the same thing. They took from unemployed workers and their families about $50 billion from an accumulated EI fund.
Can you confirm those figures? It looks to me from your analysis that it will be $12 billion up until the next election and $20 billion up to 2016-17.
Is that an accurate estimation of the accumulated surplus?