In the 1968 election, when asked about whether he would raise taxes or run a deficit, Pierre Trudeau said, the government was no Santa Claus. He said he would not run a deficit and would not increase taxes. He actually said it long before George W. Bush did, with that famous “read my lips” statement of in the 1992, I believe, presidential election against Bill Clinton. Mr. Trudeau said that Santa Claus was not what the Government of Canada is.
What happened after 1968? We had those brief nine months with the Right Honourable Joe Clark as Prime Minister. Then Pierre Trudeau came back in from 1980 to 1984. In that period the father lost the finance minister. His name was John Turner, later to be Prime Minister of Canada for a couple of months. John Turner had incredible passion and belief in the rules of order of the House of Commons.
Let me ask you a question, any representative of the riding of Vancouver Quadra, which coincidentally is currently represented by the Minister of Fisheries. She can see the ocean but no fishermen can afford to live there. It's true. Sorry, it's true.
I say this because John Turner was quite a parliamentarian and respected ministerial accountability to no end, so much so that he resigned from the Trudeau cabinet over philosophical differences. One of them was the desire to deficit spend during the era of 21% interest rates and double-digit inflation in the 1970s, which was called “stagflation”.