Mr. Speaker, I thank the hon. parliamentary secretary for his series of questions. He has touched on a number of issues and on this bill in particular. I commend the government if it is trying to improve services. Obviously we have to do that.
However, as the hon. member for Calgary North pointed out it is kind of like polishing the chrome when the transmission is going. The big issue before the country today is social program reform. It is one of the huge issues. Let us not debate whether answering the phone sooner is a good thing. Of course it is. We all know that answering the phone and providing faster service for seniors is important. We understand that.
By pulling out vague references to discussion about social program reform or about minor aspects of social program reform, it does not follow that the government made any kind of commitment in the red book to deal with this problem in a serious way.
The government downplayed the whole issue during the election campaign. It downplayed the seriousness of the debt situation to the point where a year after it came into power it is just now beginning to realize how seriously we are in debt in this country. Not because it wants to but because international investors have told them: "Get your act together or we are going to start to move our money out of the country". It is that simple. It is not because it somehow saw this ahead of time and put together a big task force and went to Canadians.
With all due respect to the parliamentary secretary, if he had referred to our zero and three plan, of which we distributed millions of copies during the election campaign, he would know we talked about our changes to social program reform. They are on the public record. In fact this spring we gave the finance minister a list of $20 billion in proposed cuts for the government to use in its efforts to get the deficit and debt under control. I offer that to the parliamentary secretary for him to look at.